Swedish (Svenska) is an East Scandinavian language spoken in Sweden, parts of Finland, and the autonomous Aland Islands. It is the most widespread Scandinavian language.With only 10.5 million speakers, Swedish is a small language compared to English and other prominent languages. This isn't surprising because a unified version was formed less than 1,000 years ago. The languages spoken nowadays in Scandinavia developed from the Old Norse language, which was pretty much the same in present...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mass emigration of some 1.3 million Swedes to the United States occurred. Emigration was due to several reasons. One was the sharp population growth. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of children born yearly doubled. The difficult living conditions in cities and the country­side were also important reasons people chose to leave Sweden. In today's episode, I will talk about these questions;Why did they leave?Where ...

Sometimes it surprises me what people know or think they know about Sweden. And today, I stumbled on a website called the fact file.org, and one of their articles was called 52 Interesting Facts About Sweden. This tickled my curiosity. So in today's episode, I will review these facts and comment on them.But before we go into the facts, let's take a look at the About Us page on this website, which you can find at https://thefactfile.org/sweden-facts/Support the Show.Thank You for listeni...

When I first moved to the US from Sweden, some things changed that I still today have trouble with, and I am talking about measurements. So let's look at some numbers, not considering the measurements. To give you a few examples, my height went from 157 to 5.1. My weight went from 63 to 139. My shoe sizes changed from 36 to 5. And my clothes went from 38 to 12. Of course, I was the same size as before, but the measurements had changed. I went from 157 centimeters to 5.1 feet. From 63 kil...

Today’s episode is inspired by an article on vox.com from 2017 that I accidentally stumbled on. The title of the article is I’m an American living in Sweden. Here’s why I came to embrace the higher taxes.Tom Heberlein writes the article, and I have a link to the full article at the bottom of the show notes.In the article, he says, “My wife and I have been dividing our time between jobs in Sweden and Wisconsin for the past dozen years, and I'm here to tell you that taxes in Sweden are not...

Today I am returning to a topic I have talked about before, and that is food. It seems like many of you enjoy it when I talk about Swedish food. So today I'm gonna take a look at the calendar for special celebration days for different foods in Sweden. Some of them I have mentioned before. and some I haven't talked about at all.Before we talk about the specific foods, you will notice that there are more special days celebrating food during the darker months of the year.If you are interes...

In today's episode, I will talk about something very close to my heart education, and the focus will be on primary education.I will divide this into five sections. In the first section, I want to give you an overview of the Swedish school system. Then I want to talk a little bit about our curriculum in part three. I want to talk shortly about grades and individual education plans. I will also. Do a very short description of Swedish teacher education. And finally, I will focus on my experience...

Last Sunday, September 9th, was the election day in Sweden, and since this is a podcast about Sweden and Swedes, I had to cover that. But before we talk about the actual results of the election, and what changes it will lead to, let’s talk about the election process in Sweden. In Sweden, the election is held on the second Sunday of September every 4th year. There are three elections held at this time;Riksdag (the parliament)Landsting (the regional assembly)Kommun (the municipal as...

Red cottages with white corners and other white trimmings are as iconic as Fika in Sweden. Many houses in Sweden are made of wood and need to be painted, the question is why so many are painted in the color Falu Rödfärg - Falu red? But to tell the story about these red cottages that you can see everywhere in Sweden we must go back in time to a place called Falun, in Dalarna, in the middle of Sweden. Actually, the history of our beloved Swedish red color begins in...

Today I want to have some fun with the Swedish language, looking at some words that sound crazy to any English speaker, translate some compound words verbatim and see if you can guess what they are, and look at some Swedish expressions and idioms that make absolutely no sense if you translate them. I will also talk about the background of the Swedish language, and how easy or hard it is to learn for an English native speaker. I hope you all will enjoy it. Support the Show.Thank...