Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Swedish Complete Course(book and cd pack) (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) (Swedish Edition)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I learned Swedish without a single formal lesson extremely quickly (in 4 months to fluency whilst living in a Swedish / English speaking environment), and bought and borrowed an enormous range of books to bring me there. I feel compelled to write a review here due to the relatively high average customer review compared with the actual low quality of the book. This book I would not recommend except as a supplement to the others when you are doing your very first lessons of the language. There are periods in learning a language where you hit a brick wall in one textbook, and you can then turn to this text to "re-learn" from another angle what you have learned before continuing. For the extremely early stages of learning the language I would recommend the Colloquial Swedish book and tapes, but once you get to about lesson 6 or 8 you will move quicker by shifting to something like Göransson & Lindholm's Nybörjarsvenska and The Essentials of Swedish Grammar (In fact, after you read and understand this grammar book which is written in English, you speak Swedish, then you need only bolt on more vocabulary and idioms get you from a basic level towards fluency). As you progress further, move onto something like Ballardini et al, Mål 3 Svenska som andraspråk.

Swedish is a fantastic language that is a lot of fun to speak and is very easy and rewarding to learn for English speakers due to its similarity to our own language. Swedish is not a language that requires rote learning of verb tables because unlike French and Spanish, etc. verb conjugations are not complex. This book does not ask you to rote learn as some do (notably Hugo's which is even worse than this one). Spoken Swedish is impossible to learn in a complete vacuum due to the nuances of the *sing-song* pronunciation that makes the language fun and can only be learned from imitation / mockery (Once you start learning you will understand what I mean when I say mockery ... you turn up the pronunciation to make fun of the language and the Swedes you are talking to, and it is only then that you are pronouncing it close to correctly. This light mockery is also central to the Swedes sense of humour).

It would be impossible, in my opinion, to learn to speak fluent or even passable Swedish from this Teach Yourself book alone, and if someone out there has actually been able to achieve passable Swedish, he/she could have cut their learning time into a fraction with a different choice of book. This book may do okay if you are only wanting to ask for directions and order a beer, but again I believe that the Colloquial Swedish book and tape set are better for that purpose also. Colloquial Swedish treats the subject more seriously with the ultimate goal in mind of getting you through the tedious early stages of learning a language to proficient as quickly and painlessly as possible (but again, I would not recommend that book as the sole teaching aid either).

I have just spent the last two months teaching myself the fundamentals of Swedish grammar, and shall relate the experience I had using the following textbooks: Croghan's "Teach Youself Swedish"; Hugo's "Simplified System Of Swedish In Three Months"(an early edition, not the updated Graves' edition, which I haven't read yet); Viberg's "Essentials Of Swedish Grammar"; and Prisma's "English-Swedish/Swedish-English Dictionary". Three of these books are available at Amazon.com.
I agree with some of the reviewers who decry the 'modernisation' of the Teach Yourself series. It has resulted in a product, which, in many respects, is inferior to the original. I can recall how the Teach Yourself editions for German and Russian that I used in the 1980s were essentially grammar books, in which a different part of speech was covered in each chapter and was followed by a basic vocabulary and exercises to test the reader's translating skills. My only criticism of these books is that they made for dry reading and at times their rote work was excessive. With the new Teach Youself series- Croghan's "Teach Yourself Swedish" being a case in point- grammar takes second place to the Dialogues, making it necessary for the reader to turn to other books, like Hugo's and Viberg's, for a better organised and more thorough explanation of grammar. But, although the Dialogues seem contrived, they cover a wide variety of topics dealing with everday situations. I realise that I may never be able to converse in Swedish if caught in one these situations, but at least the book showed me how such a conversation would be carried out. Furthermore, the book is filled with fascinating tidbits of Swedish history, culture, customs, and cuisine. Here, then, are two reasons why I felt the book was worth the purchase. (I hope that the publishers of the Teach Yourself series will take note of the criticisms that their books have received by Amazon reviewers, and re-write some of them, incorporating the best of the old with the best of the new.)
With regard to the companion audio tapes, I think that some of the reviewers have been too harsh in quibbling about the strange accents and intonations of speakers appearing on the tapes. As a new student of a foreign language, I am not all that concerned about slight regional differences in accent. What I found more annoying on these tapes, as well as on other tapes in the Teach Yourself series, is that the speakers assume a normal rate of speaking from the very first lesson. This makes it difficult for the listener to make out the individual sounds of vowels and consonants. To their credit, the speakers on the Hugo tapes deliberately speak slowly for the first half of the book and avoid the slurring of words, which can confuse the listener. One other fault of the Croghan tapes is that the producers skimped on the final chapters and recorded only one Dialogue and one exercise for each of them.
I strongly recommend Prisma's dictionary for the beginning student of Swedish. There was scarcely a word that I wasn't able to find in this sturdy little book. Each definition includes colloquial phrases and expressions to help the reader grasp the various shades of meaning that a word can have. Though the size of its type is somewhat small, on the whole, this dictionary is equal in quality to the Cassell's and Collins dictionaries I have used for learning other languages.
There is little that I can add to what reviewers have already said about Viberg's grammar. All of them have praised it highly.

If you are searching for a beginner-level book in order to learn enough Swedish to enjoy visiting the country, don't waste your money on this book and tape like I did!!

Although the audio tape included with this book is a good way to get a feel for how Swedish sounds, it is definitely not at a beginner level. The book does not have enough detailed information for someone who has no prior background in a Scandanavian language to be able to learn this language without lots of extra help (and having learned Spanish and Japanese previously, I found them both MUCH easier to learn than this book made learning Swedish).

The Teach Yourself series is officially recognized by the University of Virginia's Department of Germanic Languages. I used this course successfully to learn Swedish and am planning a trip to Sweden so that I can show off my language ability. This course can be difficult for beginners, but patience and perserverance pay off in the long run. The Teach Yourself Danish and German courses are also excellent.

I found this book very useful and after getting to lesson 4 I am able to hold simple conversations with my Swedish colleagues. I see that a teacher is critical of this book, but as a student I am finding it useful, firstly because it addresses usual situations you might find yourself in, like the vocabulary used when visiting someone, having something to eat, etc. and is discusses the grammar in small digestible chunks. I learnt German some years ago and the books I had then were nowhere near as good. I also have looked at some 'Teach Yourself' books German/Swedish and find them very clumsey. I don't mind at all if there are different dialects on the tapes because that is exactly how you are confronted with the language when you start speaking to Swedish people and additionally it trains the ear. So far so good - I have been able to write my first small letters to my Swedish step daughter and I thinks thats not bad going.

So, ya wanna learn Swedish? Then thank your stars for Vera Crogan's "Swedish: A Complete Course for Beginners". This book is custom-made for people just like yourself who have always wanted to learn Swedish, but never quite found the appropriate study guide to use. The book contains 18 lessons, each broken up into 8 parts: a dialogue, the vocabulary to the dialogue, a true or false test, things you need to know about grammar and culture, important words and expressions, language patterns, exercises, and further dialogues testing your comprehension. The book is very easy to get through. You can go at your own pace, and you can also use the book as a grammar reference once you've advanced to a higher level. With this book, you're bound to advance quickly if you're serious about learning Swedish!

When I first became interested in learning Swedish, I bought this book. As I had no previous knowledge of the language, at first it seemed a little hard to understand the dialogues and paragraphs, but by the time I reached the last chapter, I had learned quite a lot. After I finished the book, I started reading Aftonbladet, which helped me to learn new words and phrases. I constantly looked up unfamiliar words and wrote them down in a notebook. Then I bought another book, Colloquial Swedish, which cantains more advanced material, and it has also helped me. These two books are a good way to start learning Swedish.

I really found this book difficult to use, leaving you with a small stock of colloquialisms but no knowledge of the actual structure of the language. Why has the "Teach Yourself" series changed their format so much? I have a copy of the "old" Teach Yourself Swedish as well, and while it's short on dialogues it certainly covers the entire grammar of the language, as well as giving a complete explanation of the pronunciation.

With the tapes, this book can guide you to some skill in pronunciation, but I suppose any book with tapes can do that. Aside from that and some of the cultural notes I didn't get much from this book. The material produced by the Swedes themselves is much better and written for literate adults, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

After deciding I wanted to learn Swedish and not having thepatience to wait until a new semester started at one of the localuniversity extension programs, I decided to try this book, since it seemed to be one of the more highly recommended ones on Amazon.com. Perhaps if you have more perseverance or a higher pain threshhold than I do, it might be worthwhile for you. I've always thought of myself as a pretty good student of language: I never had much trouble learning Spanish, French, of Japanese. But this book makes things hard.

It starts with a quick overview of Swedish pronunciation but then throws the reader in head first. And considering that the tape only covers a portion of the written text, I found myself forced to guess how words were pronounced. I mean, is "lakare" (doctor) pronounced as "luh-kah-ray" or "la-care". Maybe it's obvious to someone who knows Swedish but as a complete beginner I had no idea.

It was also tedious reading because I had to continually flip back to the pronunciation guide to figure out how to pronounce things. It would have been nice if a phonetic spellings (along with accent and tone indications) had been included, at least in the early chapters.

The short quizzes are often inscrutable. One of the first true or false questions uses vocabulary and grammar that haven't even been introduced yet, forcing the reader to guess what the answer is. A short time later the reader is shown a picture of a smiling man in a kilt and asked what his profession is. Apparently the smile is supposed to hint to you that he is in a dentist.

I don't think it is impossible to learn languages from books, although it is certainly harder than with a live instructor. There are good language books out there. Unfortunately, I don't think this is one of them. Also unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of alternatives for learning Swedish.

The quality of the Teach Yourself series varies, but this one must rank toward the bottom, down there with Teach Yourself Dutch. I second everything in Steve Malcolm's review below. I would also add:

1. The pronunciation guide in the introduction is not only simplistic, it is in some cases flat out wrong. Someone would have to have a poor command of either Swedish or English to suggest (for example) that Swedish long i is pronounced as ea in English 'heat'.

2. One or two of the speakers on the tape have strong regional accents. That would be fine if the book identified them and discussed the peculiarities, but it doesn't. The average student will be confused at pronunciations that differ sharply between speakers and seem to make a liar out of the pronunciation guide.

3. The dialogues are wholly unnatural and - worse - too mind-numbingly boring to retain any interest. Some might think this a small point. As a language instructor, I KNOW better. The author has tried to sustain the same characters through a "story" in which an English family visits friends in Sweden. (Bizzarely, the role of a young boy is played by one of the other speakers, a middle-aged woman speaking hoarsely in a rather pathetic and utterly failed attempt to sound prepubescent and masculine.) They talk about what to eat, what time to get up, and how to get to the post office, but every conversation is merely a long list of new vocabulary. Which brings us to...

4. Too much vocabulary too fast. More importantly...

5. Too much grammar too fast. The author apparently feels this is okay if the grammar is not explained, utterly clueless that this only makes matters worse. Consider the first lesson's dialogues, in which the student must deal with: present conjugation, the definite article (a tough one for English speakers), the supine (!), the future, both genders, restrictive clauses, demonstrative pronouns, reflexives, genitive, and possessive pronouns! Apparently this is okay, because "only" the infinitive, indefinite articles, the present tense and word order are treated in the grammar section.

In short... save your money.