Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Swedish Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

When I began graduate studies at Helsingfors Universitet, I was keen on learning some Swedish. I examined a number of different resources, including TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH, the most widely available self-teaching textbook in the English-speaking world. Unfortunately, Vera Croghan's work must be one of the poorest volumes in the entire Teach Yourself series.

I had already learnt some basic Swedish for another textbook before opening TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH for the first time, and so I was shocked by how Croghan chose to begin her course. Right from the first chapter the reader faces a deluge of highly colloquial and idiomatic language. There's no gentle start from the very basics; instead, it's like you are dumped right into a Swedish crowd. Total immersion is a good language-learning technique in a classroom environment where a trained teacher can skillfully direct the group's activities, but I imagine most home learners will swiftly give up. Worse yet, many of the colloquialisms are already obsolete, and the use of several words Croghan claims are everyday will result in laughter from your Swedish friends.

The exercises make too few demands of the reader, requiring him only to utter a few phrases. Sweden is not a country where you need survival language skills. If you try to use overly simple language on the street, people are just going to answer in English. So, the learner might as well work towards as rigorous a command of the language as possible. It is therefore a pity that Croghan doesn't include exercises that really challenge you and force you to start thinking in Swedish. Furthermore, as Swedish word order is so different from that of English, the reader should do long prose translations from English into Swedish to flex his syntactic muscles. But you won't get that here.

Now, even though the course is completely useless for the beginners that it is marketed to, TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH does have some value for people with some amount of experience with the language already. The dialogues, especially as heard from the cassettes or CD, make one more comfortable with colloquial speech and popular expressions.

The book I eventually used to reach an intermediate level of Swedish is Gladis Hird's Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Hird's textbook is among the best for any language that I've ever encountered, and teaches one both everyday Swedish and the basics of the literary language. Even when it goes for quite a bit on the used market it's worth seeking out more than TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH.

If you've never studied Swedish, then Teach Yourself Swedish IS NOT the series for you. I consider myself pretty apt at language-learning and wanted to find an audio series that would help me learn Swedish from scratch. Previously, I had used an abridged Pimsleur audio guide to study Brazilian Portuguese and found it too slow. Also, it catered almost exclusively to banal tourist-speak.

I purchased the "Teach Yourself Swedish" book and CD because it promised that users would "progress quickly beyond the basics." Unfortunately, the series spends very little time on the basics. After a zippy rundown on vowels and consonants and a mind-boggling string of Swedish tongue-twisters, the series mmediately launched into fast-paced dialogues with no word-by-word, much less sentence repetition. I was drowning in a sea of words.

This isn't hands-free learning. The audio portion would be useless to a true beginner who was not simultaneously following along in the book.

However, I would recommend this course to someone that had already learned the elementary principles of the language. If you have taken a two-week intensive course or have spent several months in Sweden, then this would be an excellent stepping stone toward more thorough understanding of the spoken and written language.

I wouldn't be so annoyed if the packaging hadn't implied that this was a series for beginners.

These CDs are great for very advanced students who only want to listen to advanced conversations in Swedish. There is not enough time given for even advanced students to repeat or to answer the questions. For each extended dialog, only one or two questions are asked, and the dialog is not explained to English to check if you understood it. I was very disappointed in this series.

The abundance of dialogues and exercises on the CDs is ideal for learning Swedish, because 1) the spelling does not coincide very closely with the pronunciation and 2) Swedish is a tonal language, unlike most other European languages, so you really have to hear it to imitate it. The lack of repetition in the audio material makes it possible to fit a lot more of it on the CDs, which is exactly why this set is so wonderful. The basics are covered sufficiently for an experienced language learner to assimilate them quickly (and since Swedish is similar to English, the basics aren't that hard anyway), and the book goes beyond that into very useful "real" Swedish.

This is one of the best language courses for autodidacts I've come across in a while.

I bought two sets, this "Teach Yourself ..." and "Pimluer Swedish Learn To ..." This one rapidly punges into moderately advanced lessons. The speaker pronounces words, but there is no pause for you to say it back and then hear it again. The pace is fast and unusable. I would suggest if someone spoke some Swedish, then this might be useful. For beginners, the Pimsleur is the way to go.

Yes, this is for people who have at least 2 languages under their belts! AND since I am fluent in English and German, Swedish is very easy for me to grasp!!! I FIND THIS SERIES IS FOR PEOPLE who are more advanced in language studies and really want to learn (or die trying)! FYI, I have also used this series for Italian and Portuguese all with great success!!!
The trick is to learn the words!!!

For an absolute beginner, this book seems poorly conceived from a pedagogical point of view. It's not just that it moves at a breakneck pace...it also fails to lay a logically ordered foundation for any pace. Vocabulary is not introduced systematically, grammatical points are made randomly, questions are asked at a considerable distance from the original information, questions are not clearly related to examples provided, the CDs don't provide enough time for properly prepared repetitions, and assume a great deal about what is possible to comprehend without providing aural examples that are well-ordered, etc.

All that said, it does give a rapid, bird's-eye view of Swedish if that's what you're looking for. If you are a person who already speaks German or another Scandinavian language (I speak and read Danish fluently already), then it's a good book to use...it cuts out a lot of the repetitious material necessary for a less experienced language learner and moves you through the basic ideas quickly.

if you are an absolute beginner, find another product. the book is poorly laid out, difficult to navigate, and has few reinforcement excerises. the cds are great for learning pronunciation but they rarely speak slowly enough for you to repeat the sentences. two thumbs serioussssly down.

It was three years ago that I started with this small course.

I figured I was going to spend 10 days in Sweden and may as well speak a few sentences. And I was hooked ! This book got me going quickly.
The key is to repeat and repeat the CDs until you follow what the speaker is saying.

Now I can easily say that I hear Swedish Radio P1, watch Swedish TV, and read newspaper via internet fluently. And I live in the US!

Granted, I bought some extra courses.

Suggested follow-up courses: Nya Mål and Svenska Untifrån from the Swedish Institutet. ( www.swedenbookshop.com. )

Let me begin this first by explaining my experience with the Swedish language.
Before attempting to learn Swedish I had already had a very high level of knowledge in Bokmål Norwegian (which is probably the closest language in the world to Swedish) due to the fact that I had a great friend from the area and wanted to intigrate myself into the culture of Scandinavia. Obviously, I developed a great respect and fascination for Scandinavia (as anybody would) and was very excited to learn Swedish from this series, as this was the only Scandinavian language taught at my university, and it was going to be a couple of years before I had the time in my schedule to enroll in this class.
I used Teach Yourself Norwegian (from the same series as the book in question) and was very pleased. Each of the 16 chapters contained maybe 100 or so new words to learn, and the grammar was clearly explained while not going overboard and overdoing it. By the end of the course I could say comfortably that I was well of my way to fluency.
Teach Yourself Swedish provides over 200 new words and idiomatic phrases in each of its 18 chapters. Obviously learning a new language is going to take some time, however this was too much. And the words were not explained clearly at all in tearms of inflexion and case. And I also feel that the words introduced early on were inappropriate for the level (for example, in chapter three you learn to say "Light travels at a speed of...kilometers per hour." and "The distance to the moon is...kilometers.") For almost every new word or phrase present, I was forced to consult a dictionary for full information about how the word was used/constructed. It took me a good two and a half years to finish this course, whereas Teach Yourself Norwegian took me maybe a little over 8 months.
Perhaps it was my own fault in thinking that Swedish was be fairly simple after learning Norwegian, but I feel that it still should be. This book I feel is aimed towards linguists who possess full comprehension of grammatical structure, yet at the same time there is huge lack as far the structure of words are concerned.
I have not tried other products out there, and I realize that there are VERY few geared towards learning any of the Scandinavian languages, but if you choose to work with this book, be prepared to put A LOT of time and effort into it and have a good dictionary at the ready!!!
Overall, the book was overdone, unorganized, and difficult to use.