musicman1982 wrote:Hello, my name is Matthew, I am English, I live in London and I am interested in learning your language. I have come across a couple of things that I wanted to ask, if anyone is able to answer these questions, it will be appreciated.
[...]
Again, I know I am asking a lot of these questions. I am not looking for a lot of information. Just something to start off with and work on. I am learning Latvian at the moment, so I am fully aware what the commitment is to learning a language. If you can spare the time, i will gladly take on board anything you say, thank you for your time and patience.
Kind regards,
Matthew.
Hej Matthew och välkommen! I'm not Swedish but I've learned a little bit of Swedish, so perhaps I can help you.
2. When it comes to sentence structure with statements, questions, etc. How is grammar used in your language? I have come across a list by Tim Ferris, who has written twelve sentences with different types of grammar structure, I will list them below:
The apple is red
It is john’s apple
I give john the apple
we give him the apple
He give it to john
She gives it to him
is the apple red
The apples are red
I must give it to him
I want to give it to her
I’m going to know tomorrow.
I can’t eat the apple.
I know what I am asking is very specific, but if anyone can answer this question, this will be greatly appreciated. If anyone can, you can say, e.g “Sentence one, will be a statement”, “Sentence six would be a question,” etc.
This is a pretty broad question Matthew. If you want translations in Swedish for each of these 12 sentences, then it's best to ask for that directly. Swedish is a Germanic language and, as such, is fairly closely related to English. Therefore in general (if not all the time?) a sentence that is a statement - also known as an indicative sentence - will be that way in both languages. The same is true of question sentences - also known as interrogative sentences. If you want to know generally how Swedish grammar works, I guess you could try googling. I know there is also a resource called "Essential Swedish Grammar" which could be helpful. Wikipedia's language articles tend to have good overviews of the language's grammar. As well, the various native speakers on this subforum can help you. But you might need to ask specific grammar questions.
Some things I can tell you: (Standard) Swedish has two genders for nouns - the common gender and the neuter gender. As a result adjectives are declined depending on the gender and number. As Jurgen said, Swedish definite articles are attached to the end of the word as a suffix. There are different rules for how they are attached. So to give you some examples,
en is the indefinite article for common gender nouns and
ett for neuter gender. The word "boy" in Swedish is
pojke and it is a common gender noun. So "a boy" would be
en pojke but "the boy" would be
pojken. The word "apple" in Swedish is
äpple and is a neuter gender noun. So "an apple" would be
ett äpple while "the apple" would be
äpplet. The same happens with plural nouns - the definite article is attached as a suffix. Swedish verbs don't conjugate for person, only for tense. So
att dansa means "to dance" but
dansar is the present tense indicative form of that. That is,
dansar means "dance/dances" in English and would be used in the present tense with all the pronouns.
I can't think of anything else to add; that's a basic overview of Swedish nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
3. Are there any words in English that are not used in your language?
As Jurgen said, there are plenty. This question is also a pretty broad question and difficult to answer. Perhaps you could argue that in general, all the words in English that were taken from French probably aren't in Swedish, though I know Swedish does have words that are of French origin.