(Untitled)

[ewx]

I found http://www.bbcactivelanguages.com/OurProducts/Italian/ProductViewer.aspx?ISBN=9781406679236 pretty good for learning tourist Italian a few years ago. But we're going to Scandinavia next and there isn't a direct equivalent in the same range. Does anyone have any recommendations for learning a little tourist-level Danish and/or Swedish?

Comments

[livredor]

The user-created Swedish course on Duolingo is reasonably good, I have found. Danish is a lot harder than Swedish; both Swedish people and Danish people are in agreement on this. lethargic_man described Swedish as being like a conlang made up by a naive English speaker; word order and a lot of grammar are almost the same as English, and a lot of the vocabulary is obviously cognate, particularly to Scottish and North-East England dialects. So if you can learn enough to be fairly comfortable with some of the weird orthography / pronunciation, it's really quite easy to guess at Swedish. For example, miljö looks like it could be anything, but once you know it's pronounced as milieu it becomes obvious that it means environment.

Most useful words for tourists: hej (pronounced more or less as hay) is a generic greeting meaning hi or bye or just generally I see you and acknowledge you. Tack (pronounced roughly as English) is a generic term of politeness meaning please or thanks or generally I respect you and we're being friendly. You can combine them,

[ewx]

Duolinguo seems promising, thanks for the recommendation.
(As it happens I have a Swedish colleague, though he's less often in the Cambridge office than he used to be, limiting my opportunities for practising on him l-)

[aldabra]

Nonono, you want Finnish. Finnish is *much more interesting*.

[ewx]

Finland might be next year…