One barrier to learning I’ve thought a lot about is the issue of assumed knowledge. That is, the teacher (be it a lecturer lecturing a large group or a book, online course, or video) will assume the learner possesses some prerequisite piece of knowledge. A lecturer teaching a university level maths course might assume that every student has knowledge of high school level calculus. This is necessary for the sake of saving time - no need to re-explain all the rules again - but will leave behind some students who have been out of high school for long enough to forget the details.

As a learner, the key is identifying the assumed knowledge and catching up on it as appropriate. In the context of myself learning to listen, speak, read, and write Swedish, this means, as I encounter and learn a grammatical concept in Swedish, I have to explain it in English and give some exapmles before explaining it in Swedish.

Articles

An article is a word that appears near a noun to identify the specificity of that noun. * The definite article in english is the world ‘the’, andrefers to a specific item of a class. E.g. The cup I am holding * The indefinite article is the word ‘a’ or ‘an’ (depending on context). E.g. A Beer from the bar.

The wikipedia page on articles goes into a lot more detail

In Swedish, the indefinite article for nouns is the ‘en’ or ‘ett’ that is prefixed before the word (e.g. ‘en ost’ - a cheese, or ‘ett glas’ - a glass). The definite article is formed by suffixing the word with ‘en’ or ‘et’. For example: ‘Osten’ - the cheese, or ‘glaset’ - the glass.

Progress update

  • Completed Phrases and Food duolingo modules
  • Still no twitter. The numbers just aren’t coming through clearly and I think I’ve tried everything it could be. Might get help from a Swede on this one on Monday.
  • described definite vs indefinite articles

Swedish numbers

  • 0 - noll
  • 1 - ett
  • 2 - två
  • 3 - tre
  • 4 - frya
  • 5 - fem
  • 6 - sex
  • 7 - sju
  • 8 - åtta
  • 9 - nio

These were taken from the learning Swedish site. This page also has recordings of what each number sounds like.

Vocab

  • bröd - bread
  • en apelsin - an oragne
  • middag - dinner
  • fisk - fish
  • kyckling - chicken
  • en frukost - breakfast
  • en ost - a cheese
  • en jordgubbe - a strawberry
  • en öl - a beer
  • en soppa - a soup
  • måltid - meal
  • kött - meat
  • fläskött - pork
  • ett glas - a glass
  • en kopp - a cup
    • can be used like ‘en kopp kaffe’
  • en tallrik - a plate
  • gaffel - fork
  • sked - spoon