Swedish from Scratch is a self-study course of beginner Swedish.
The author of the course is an SBX researcher Elena Volodina. Grammar exercise generator is under development, jointly by a master student Emelie Aalto, with Elena Volodina and David Alfter as supervisors.
The initiative to start this course is an act of good will, a token of support to Ukrainian refugees coming to Sweden as a consequence of the war with Russia. This is a work-in-progress. New lessons, texts, grammar explanations and exercises are added when there is a need and time.
In some future, Swedish-English lessons in Quizlet will be added, to make the course accessible to people who have some basic knowledge of English. The other parts of the course are purely in Swedish, and can be reused as such for people with different backgrounds.
Course "ingredients"
Our materials:
- Quizlet-app - an app to work with vocabulary and its translation into Russian. Later an English version will be added. The app allows to do exercises with the lesson vocabulary - feel free to experiment!
- Clilstore - a platform to work with texts. The platform allows to click words in the text, which opens a window for dictionaries. You will need to set a language for translation and a dictionary from a list of choices. At the beginning, LEXIN (Russian version, or the laguage of your choice) is recommended.
- GitHub - used for grammar explanations and storage of links to the lessons
- Lärka-based grammar exercise generator - (a prototype of) automatically developed exercises based on the texts
Third-party materials:
- Lätt svenska med Oscar - a podcast channel for listening exercises in easy Swedish
- UR.SE/SPRAKPLAY UtbildningsRadio, for Subject (Ämne) Svenska som andraspråk och SFI - a channel where a selection of films, series and programs are texted and adjusted to those who learn Swedish. You can select the language you know in Settings (Inställningar) and the level of your knowledge of Swedish (A1 or A2). As you watch a video, click on each word in the subtitles. The word will be translated. A “hat”-icon opens a full transcription of the episode, and offers some exercises to train vocabulary. Experiment further! The more you watch and train vocabulary, the better it is! Write our vocabulary you want to learn, write texts on the same topic, but about yourself. The effort will not be wasted! Some episodes will be offered for self-study in this course. As of December, 31, 2022, the UR Språkplay has discontinued this service.
- Maslova-Lashanskaya. Swedish language - a comprehensive online Swedish grammar in Russian. Learners are addressed to different chapters to get acquainted with grammar aspects of the materials.
- SFI - Svenska för Invandrare. Övningar & andra diverse materials... - an online resource for beginner learners of Swedish. Some introductory grammar chapters are translated into Russian and offered to the course users.
Access the course
Telegram channel: https://t.me/quizlet4swedish
Via text-collection: https://clilstore.eu/cs/11399
Archive with links
https://elenavolodina.github.io/SwedishFromScratch/Texts
Blogs, articles, talks and news about the course
- December, 9, 2022. Guest talk at NLP4CALL workshop. ICALL research: agenda vs reality
- Article: Elena Volodina and David Alfter. 2022. ICALL: Research versus reality check. In Volodina, Dannélls, Berdicevskis, Forsberg and Virk (editors), Live and Learn – Festschrift in honor of Lars Borin, pages 145–151. GU-ISS-2022-03, University of Gothenburg.
- April, 29, 2022 (blog): SwedishFromScratch - a mini-course for Ukranians
- May, 6, 2022 (university news): Forskare utvecklar digital språkkurs i svenska för ukrainare