Swedish

This grammar is admittedly unorthodox. I have felt for many years that the teaching of Swedish has been in need of a shake-up. Being that rara avis, a teacher of Swedish with no drop of Scandinavian blood, and having come upon Swedish first as an undergraduate in an American university, I see it perhaps with different eyes than one who has had it in his blood from childhood. I am inclined to consider this an advantage in some ways. The underlying idea of the book is implied in its title. It is meant to be intensely practical, and so some corners have been intentionally cut. Experience has shown, for instance, that verb plurals are nowadays an unnecessary luxury. The intricacies of Swedish tradition with regard to noun declensions and verb conjugations and definite article endings as presented in some earlier Swedish grammars have had many a poor foreigner in a sadly muddled state. I have stormed those citadels and, I hope, made a dent. I have demoted the infinitive to the background where it belongs. Swedish is an extremely easy language, but some of the earlier grammars have been too scholarly to let the student find that out. There is nothing whatever scholarly about this one. It tries to speak the student’s own language. I will be accused of over-brevity, of non-conformity, of omitting reading selections and of choosing my vocabulary without regard for frequency lists. All this is true and intentional. My reply is that this is not meant to be either a reference grammar or a full first course in Swedish, but rather the grammatical portion of such a course. There are several good beginners’ readers now available to supplement this book. My sole aim has been to get the grammar as systematically, intelligibly, memorably and quickly behind as possible. With this book, that can be done within two months in a college class meeting three times a week. I regularly manage to do so. Only after that do we plunge into reading, and then and only then can we begin in earnest to build vocabulary. To be easy, the grammar of a language must be seeable in perspective as a whole and its various inflectional peculiarities reduced as far as possible to the simple unity that native speakers fondly believe it has, and not be an endless bore of disjointed minutiae. Last, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I have used successive versions of this book in mimeographed form with class after class for some seven years, and their reactions and their success convince me that my approach at least is justified. Otherwise it would not have been possible for me to go on being the only non-Swede teaching Swedish to non-Swedish students at a non-Swedish college and get away with it. As things are, it has been an exciting and fascinating adventure. At this point I must express heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Axel Johan Uppvall, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. But for him I would never have studied Swedish in the first place, never have learned it, and so never have been assigned to the United States Legation in Stockholm and never have met Rigmor Hallqvist, who as my long-suffering wife has ceaselessly encouraged me in this and other projects.