[.ca] Essentials of Swedish Grammar (ISBN 0844285390)

Wonderful!:
Absolutely essential for learning more than just "travel" swedish. Easy to learn and layed out nicely.

Very clear and complete examples.:
Unlike other Swedish grammer books for English speakers, this book is both compact and easily "carryable" but also complete and full of fantastic examples. This book gives Swedish examples and translates all of them into English. The book tells you how English and Swedish are similar or different, which makes it easier to memorize the rules of Swedish. Furthermore, the book makes good use of bold print and different type sizes to draw your attention to the most important part of the rule being taught. Because of the great use of examples, this book is a very good choice for English speakers who can't define every part of speech; this book defines the parts and shows you how they work. (This book explains the difference between "who" and "whom" better than any English teacher I've ever had!)

I was a grammar phobe.:
My mind automatically switches off when anybody even tries to mention grammar constructs (anybody who has studied for GMAT and the sentence correction sections will sympathise). However, this book was easy to get into and, surprisingly left me with greater understanding rather than feeling befuddled and confused. An experience unlike any I have ever had with grammar prior.

Great little Swedish grammar book:
This is a very well organized, clear, and concise book on Swedish. As a couple of other reviewers have noted, there aren't that many books available on the subject on the mass market, for some reason, and so your choices are fairly limited, unless you have access to a good college library with more academic linguistic books. Swedish is one of the main Germanic family languages, like English. Supposedly, the language closest to modern-day English is Frisian, a northwest German language, and Frisian and English share features that no other members of the family have, according to an article I read once, although they didn't say specifically what they were. But I do recall that Frisians are sometimes the butt of jokes since they're regarded sort of like "Okies" or rural, rustic folk in the U.S. Anyway, having studied some German I thought I'd try to learn a little about another Germanic family language, and this book was great for that. Swedish grammar is more complex than English in that it is a more highly inflected language, but it's really no worse than German, so if you have some background in that, you'll be fine. Nouns are declined for number, definiteness vs. indefiniteness, and the nominative and genitive cases. There are five delension patterns depending on the two letters the noun ends with, and a fifth that is just the bare stem word. Adjectives are inflected the same way, and are no longer inflected according to case as in Old Swedish. There are nominative, possessive, and direct object forms for the pronouns. Comparative and superlative forms in Swedish are pretty much idential to English. Adverbs come in three types, plain adverbs, older noun or adjective case forms (mostly datives) which have survived as adverbs, and neuter adjectives used as adverbs. The last group is easy to form from the indefinite neuter singular adjective, which isn't that difficult. Swedish verbs fall into one of five conjugations. The first three of are called "weak," because they've undergone reduction historically and lost the older Germanic stem changes. The fourth conjugation is usually referred to as the "strong" conjugation, and the fifth as the "mixed" conjugation (since it has a "strong" imperfect stem, but a "weak" supine). Strong verbs are those that undergo an internal change in the past tenses, such as in sleep, slept, or sing, sang, sung. Swedish syntax is very similar to English, except for cases when inverted word order is used, similar to what happens in German. Like English, Swedish has some verbs that change their meaning in combination with other words, such as adverbs, as in phrasal verbs, which are constructions like run up a bill, run out of, brush up on, and so on, where the meaning of the word "run" or "brush" changes. Unlike English, but like German, the Swedish adverbs and particles can shift between being used as a verb prefix or as separate words. Swedish is one language that has been modelled on a computer since it was regarded as being regular enough to create grammatical macros to produce the grammar. I recently came across an example of such a computer program, and so I thought I'd list the macro for the non-modal auxiliary and finite modal verb-phrase formation rule: (@vp.aux.vp(Aux,V), vp:\o@tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...\c) --? (Aux, v:\osemanticAux=y, arglist=(V,vp:\o...\c), @tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...\c) + (V, vp:\ovform=(inf"/supine), ...\c. Anyway, not sure I understand that myself but it sure looked cool. But getting back to the present book, this is a very nice little introduction to Swedish with a concise summary of the grammar and how it differs from English. There are lots of useful example sentences in both Swedish and English, some good vocabulary, and finally, not the least of its virtues is that the price is right.

Best Introduction to Swedish Grammar available in English:
As any native English speaker trying to learn Swedish had found out, there is a real lack of useful Swedish learning tools out there. One of the very few items that I can recommend without reservation is this basic grammar by Viberg et al. - it does a great job of covering all the major grammar points without bogging the learner down in obscure terms or arcane exceptions that will rarely be encountered in real, spoken Swedish. In a practically minded manner, limits itself to using the vocabulary that a person needs to pick up in their first few years of study. Finally, it is exceptionally well organized - do you need to find out how adjectives are declined in Swedish? Well, you can find the appropriate section very easily by looking in either the well organized table of contents or the detailed index in the back. Twenty minutes of no-fuss, no-muss reading and you'll learn all you'll ever need to know about adjectives. It's a great book to have in your backpack to pull out while riding the bus - it's such an easy read, it feels more like pleasure reading than studying. Highly Recommend!