The Swedish Vowels, Part 2: The Sounds
2014 ж. 19 Жел.
80 538 Рет қаралды
This is part 2 of a 2 part video series introducing the Swedish vowels.
In this video, the Swedish vowels are presented one by one together with the sounds that they represent. An overview of the sounds gone through is shown at the end.
Part one is available here: • The Swedish Vowels, Pa...
RELATED VIDEOS
Predicting Swedish Vowel Length
• Predicting Swedish Vow...
---
FOLLOW / SUPPORT
KZhead: / academiacervena
Facebook: / academiacervena
Patreon: / academiacervena
---
You explain everything so well, and I'm glad to see someone actually using the IPA instead of just saying "it sounds like this in English"
Thank you! Comparisons with English and other languages definitely have their place as well, but unfortunately it's seldom done right. IPA is indeed a much better starting point for most situations!
Congratulations to all Swedish learners who has found this video series. Because if you master these vowels and pitch accent you will sound better than EVERY person on KZhead that has learned swedish as a foreign language. Trust me, I've looked around. Even in real life I actually only know one foreign learner who has mastered native pronunciation.
Oh dear, what have we done?? When you go into the details describing exactly how to pronounce each variant of the vowels, it's like, YES, exactly. You've got it all right. It is those super subtle nuances that reveal a non-native speaker. I am fascinated. I had no idea that our vowels are so.... Complicated. Sorry about that, all learners..
0:30 - Aa - (long is like in fAther and pAlm) 0:52 Aa - short 1:13 - Ää long similar to English "gEt" but longer 1:37 Ää short 1:51 exception (as in cAt) 2:10 + Ee (similar to the first part of the vowel in gAme) 2:49 Ee short is zero different from short ä 3:07 Unstressed short E 3:17 short E before Rr 3:22 long E before Rr can be "Ää before Rr" as well but this is rare and limited to a few words and names 3:36 Öö the same as E with rounded lips 4:14 short Öö 4:29 Öö before Rr 4:48 Åå - like american "gO" 5:21 shiort Åå 5:37 Ii - like in bee for more in front of the mouth 6:21 short Ii - it between bEE and bit (bet) 6:37 Yy = rounded Ii 7:13 short Yy 7:28 Uu - long similarly to long Yy but not so far the the front of the mouth. Uu is close to the american "chOOse" but AU, NZ and Scottish pron. is more close. 8:35 short Uu 8:58 Oo - like school and pool but slightly further in front of the mouth 9:42 short Uu 9:58 Exception for Oo - identical pronunciation like Åå
This way in this comment is stupid because I have a British accent so I pronounce it differently than you do this is not helpful
@@williamgoldsman8513 that's the author's explanation, everything from the video. He's certainly not aware of the particular English dialect we speak.
This video has cleared up every question I had about vowels, yay. Every single video you've made about Swedish is absolutely invaluable to us learners, so thank you for your hard work!
Happy to be able to help!
Beautifully done. I particularly appreciated how you handled vowel length and compression. Blessed are those who stumble first onto these resources on their Swedish language journeys. :D
I'm a native Italian speaker, so my vowel inventory is very limited, so for me this is incredibly useful and very well explaiend! I had simply given up trying to pronounce vowels that weren't in my language because I would end up butchering words left and right. Thank you so much.
Hey, mate! Same here! Italian is much different from Swedish so I get the struggle.
To my Italian ears, I noticed something strange with "long e", but I didn't get it right. I ended up saying something like /vjeːt/ for "vet" 😅 Now it's everything more clear and, knowing it, it's not difficult to say /veːᵊt/ anymore. I really thank you for this video!
This is one of the best videos on youtube, cannot even thank you enough for this thing.
This is so difficult! I'm going to definitely have to rewatch this a million times Haha.
Best explanation thus far for me! Excellent! I thought I heard all these little "makeweights" after many vowels, but nowhere was this phenomenon explained. Thumbs up!!
Thanks a lot :) you are the best Swedish teacher I have ever seen. Swedish is so hard to speak :( but I love to learn :)
Thank you very much! I'm glad that my videos are helping you :)
True
Det är ganska lätt när man väl lärt sig det. Its rather simple once you have learned it.
I've been looking for something like this for ages, thanks a lot! Very useful. Most websites that teach the language don't go this far with technical stuff. Can't wait for more videos.
Thank you very much! I'm glad that it helped you, I've always thought that languages are a lot easier to get a grip on if you actually go into the real details! More videos are coming :)
Wow, this is absolutely brilliant! I find Swedish pronunciation really challenging, I always fail to precisely mimic your way of producing sounds. The video is very helpful.
Thank you so much for the videos. It's been hard to find resources that really explain how to pronounce things instead of "just copy what I say". I'd rather know all the "why's" that lead to the end product. I'm learning Swedish on my own, so without youtube I'd really be at a loss.
Thank you for saying so! I wholeheartedly agree with the feeling of wanting to understand and not just learn new features of a language!
For me with learning anything, I need to understand the whys. It makes the rest of the process easier. Plus, I do have a slight hearing loss due to an ear infection when I was child. There several months where I could hardly hear at all, so it natural for me to pay close attention to a person's face when they talk - sort of untrained lip reading. So have you explain all the positioning helps me so much.
That is great! Thank you very much and keep adding videos, that is absolutely a brilliant idea! Plus the quality of the teaching is far beyond what you can find anywhere else online! :)
Thank you very much!
you have no idea how helpful this is for someone moving to Sweden and been learning Swedish for the past 6 months. thanks man! or, tack ska du ha!
Watching this on 15.8.2023, upon retaking Swedish. You explain the Swedish language sooooo well! I'll recommend this to every single person (who knows English of course) learning Swedish.
I m able to speak German and English and French fluently! Using the IPA and examples from different languages made things much easy to catch up! You r a genius bro! big THANKS ♡♡ 2019 haha Subscribed ✔👌🏻
I've been trying desperately to figure out what makes the long i in Swedish sound so distinct. Everywhere I've looked just describes it as /i:/, which obviously isn't the full picture. Thanks so much for explaining it so well.
Just fantastic. So clear and precise. I have been struggling with the subtle differences I hear when listening to native speakers. You have made it understandable! Thank you.
Glad to hear! :)
even 9 years later your video helped me, really.
Tack så mycket! I'm so glad I found this channel. Un abrazo grande
Adam: hi this is- Bluetooth headset: battery low
Really insightful and understandable at the same time. Thanks a lot for sharing
denna serie är så bra tack så mycket
Just what I needed. Thanks!
Your videos are the best that one can find on Swedish phonology! Two years ago you motivated me to study Swedish because I got interested in its pronunciation. Thank you so much! Now I am making a long series of videos on phonology of all languages that I speak. The series is oriented to Russian viewers but there are English subs.
Brilliant! I just loved this so much!!! Tnksss
Sooo helpful! Thank you so much!
I find your videos very useful and educational. It's very easy for me to understand these lessons so far. Tack så mycket, Adam! Love your effort in making these videos! (:
Thank you for your kind words!
Been confused about differences with German concerning ä ö and e. Tack så mycket!
Tack så mycket!!
Very well explained, made my brain totally dead, tough! I will rewatch it every day for the next 2 weeks.
It is so helpful! Thank you so much :)
The long i sound is so unique. It sounds both pretty and funny at the same time.
Thank you! I learned so much.
Please don't stop making Swedish language tutorials! :)
I assure you I have no such plans :)
What a wonderful series. You inspire me to teach.
Thank you for your kind words!
Great video, and thanks for including the IPA notations, it helped a lot!
these are so good lessons, well explained!
Thank you very much!
Helt fantastiskt! Det vore intressant att höra vad du vet om finlandsvenska vokaler i förhållande till rikssvenska (och kanske även finska).
It's nice that sometimes you say that is similar to Spanish because as a Mexican I can have a better idea of the vowel.tack så mycket.
Tack! This is super helpful!
Phenomenal video. It helped affirm my pronunciation as I've been learning. For some reason I don't find Swedish vowels difficult, just needed to hear them a couple times to for them to stick. Perhaps I have my bilingual English-French upbringing to thank. This has definitely helped with figuring out how to say a word without the need to hear it said first. Tack så mycket!
Glad to have been of help!
Woow, such a great explanation!
Thank you!
Thank you for making it easier to learn swedish,
Fantastiskt bra förklaring! Skickar den till vänner jag känner som pluggar svenska!
Tack så mycket :)
thank you for sharing this knowledge. I'm an autodidact learning Swedish at the moment. Unfortunately, I seem to lack the skill of catching the right sound by ear, so I need to analize eveyrthing on the level of the mechanics of articulation and phonology. I gonna watch this video every day now, so the right articulaton sticks. If I may suggest a topic, you could also make a video on Swedish prosody. I quite the unit of mora quite fascinating.
Always useful to come back to. I was pronouncing everything wrong, like saying ä like air instead of e.
This is absurdly difficult for romance language speakers and our very limited vowel repertory.
Jättebra video. Hälsningar från Norge
Tack så mycket!
Hej! love the way you explain things! would it be possible to get a detailed explanation of how to make the long "i" sound, kind of like what you did with de "tj" and "sj" sound (with the diagrams and everything), I've tried every possible explanation I've found online and for the life of me I just can't seem to get it right, it is by far the most puzzling sound I've ever encountered in a language, tack på förehand!
It would definitely be a good idea to make such a video, but I don't have any concrete plans as of this moment. The major problem with the Swedish long /iː/, in my experience is 1) the final /j/ sound, and 2) the tongue position. The Swedish /iː/ is more fronted than the /i/ of most languages, so you have to push your tongue a bit forward (easier said than done of course, it's not the best way to explain through text...), and then remember to "drag" it into the closing /j/. Hope that helps! Glad you like my videos :)
This is so excellent. It’s also one of the few places I’ve seen the bizarreness of the Swedish /i/ acknowledged. To me it always sounds like “helium voice.” For years I absolutely cannot figure out how to make this unearthly sound. I can come close if I make my mouth like an “L” and say “ee” through it, but that’s impossible to do after a rolled r. Send help.
For the Swedish (long) /i/, the tongue is usually more fronted than in most languages. So I would suggest trying to say a 'normal' /i/, and then move the blade of the tongue a bit further forward/up towards the alveolar ridge.
This is an amazing way of describing everything and thank you so much for this. But I have to say... this is so f@king hard...
I like your clear explanations, easy to follow. Thanks! I'm sharing your playlist with a student. There is however an equivalent sound for ö in English: it pronounces like the 'e' in 'jerk'.
That's more like rhotacized schwa, rather than the ö (œ) vowel
@@jannovotny4797 Yes, but it is the closest sound I could think of that an English native speaker would be familiar with, to help them learn to make the sound.
Hi. First, I'd like to thank you for this lesson. Second, my family on my dad's side is Swedish and I'm planning to go there for a while, somehow, I haven't been able to pronounce one vowel, *long i* and I would like some help on how to pronounce properly, please.
You mentioned in the video that the /e:/ sound is similar to the first vowel sound in "game", which is /ei/. But I feel these two sounds are quite different since /e:/ is a long vowel while /ei/ is a diphthong vowel.
It's worth mentioning that some dialects of Swedish do differentiate short ä and e.
It is, but the distinction is non-standard, and often doesn't fit well with the spelling patterns laid out, which makes it cumbersome to bring up in a presentation like this one.
my brain cells are dying but your video is so helpful. i'll watch this million times
This made my brain die! But I will watch gain another day :)
One step at a time! :)
Great videos! But how can I know if a vowel has to be short or long just from seeing the written word? Is it maybe explained in another video? Really thanks anyway for all these thorough lessons.
You're welcome! The video you're looking for is called _Predicting Swedish Vowel Length_ :)
Still having difficulties with E, I and Y (especially the first two) after two years of learning, so here I am, again.
I'm sorry to hear that you're having such problems (though I can understand why - those sounds are a bit weird!), but glad that you find the video helpful :)
What was the name of the substitution of a Swedish letter with two English letters as explained in the following line: "If you don't manage to get these characters, the standard way is to substitute å with aa, ä with ae, and ö with oe." There is a term for this substitution and I forgot what it is ?
are there any larger texts/paragraphs that one can practice on and then watch a video/audio how some native teacher pronounces/reads it? i study swedish in my free time but i dont have anywhere to practice on / anyone to crrect me unless i personally go to sweden
Do you have contiguous online courses available? These are the explanations I was looking for
OMG this is amazing! my brain is dying but this!! its like having a teacher who isnt going to laugh while i mutilate some of the words.
Thank you! That's part of the beauty with video lessons-everyone can go at their own pace :)
Lol "o" is why I sought this video out 😂
Thank you so much for the videos! They helped me a great deal. The letter Y and and U are the most confusing to me, especially the long vowels. Speaking French and Mandarin Chinese, I still can't get to produce these sounds correctly. I hear clear difference between Swedish "ny" and the French "nu". But when saying "nu", we already have to round our lips so hard as if we were about to kiss someone. Isn't the same way to "kiss someone" when saying "ny" ? or the position of tongue matters too ?
In French and Mandarin, the lip rounding is compressed, while in Swedish it is protruded. So the lips are more "pouty" in Swedish, you could say. Another layman's way of putting it is to say that in French the lips are rounded 'inwards', while in Swedish they're rounded 'outwards'. As for tongue position, the tongue is indeed somewhat more fronted for the Swedish /y/ than it is in for example French. I'd say that the French u has a tongue position somewhat in between Swedish *y* and *u*.
Academia Cervena Thank you so much for your explanation! I went out and practiced again and again. I don't know why evey time I tried to round my lips, the y sound turned out to be the French u. I guess I still didn't get the difference between protruded and compressed... A book describe the y sound like something between the french u and the i. Then I am thinking, is it the "ui" sound in "nuit" ?
Can you make a sentence/ paragraph/poem that makes sense and has all these vowels in order also I can learn them?
5:35 the Swedish "i" is nothing like the i in bee or feet. There is some kind of derpy throat filter applied to the sound which modifies the timbre significantly. It's like it has this muffled quality. It's VERY confusing. I can't do it.
If måla/skåp/etc is not stressed in a sentence what vowel sound would the å take?
Hi, a question. You didn't cover it in the video, but in the Swedish word "service", the first e is pronounced similar to ö. Is this a reoccurring pattern or is it just an isolated case? Thanks for a very interesting video, even to a native speaker!
Thank you! When "properly" assimilated into Swedish, is pronounced with a normal Swedish ö-sound, as if it were spelled . I'd call it fairly regular, since the English sequence er/ir/ur usually gets assimilated to _ör_ in Swedish. Cf. how English _nerd_ becomes Swedish _nörd_, only that in that case the spelling was changed too!
Fascinating, thanks a lot!
I just started Swedish and the previous language I've learnt was Spanish. Vowels are very different in swedish . I found the previous video(part 1 )helpful. This one gives more details though.The most difficult part of the vowels for me ,has been so far the pronunciation of the Long - iiiii-.Because has nothing to do with English or Spanish or Greek one. I put the language up and towards the front of the mouth. And yes the iii-j sound comes ...But there's something more that comes along with the iii j sound on the audio texts of the books I use. A sound that comes from the throat as if someone pressing your neck and you can't swallow..It reminds me a bit of a Danish sound. Am I right or it's just my imagination? Thank you for reading our questios
I'm glad you find the videos helpful! If you exclude the [j] part of the long 'i', the only difference from other /i/ sounds is that the Swedish one is slightly fronted, i.e. the tongue is moved slightly forward. The throat is not involved anymore than with any other vowel :)
Thank you very much! Now i´m not questioning myself whether i´m right or wrong. Thanks again for your help and support to the ones that are taking their first steps in Swedish! :-)
Hello, I would like to ask you about the pronunciation of long E: As mentioned in your video, it is similar to the first part of the diphthong /ei/ in the word game, so it's more like an /e/ as in the word get but longer? Or is it like the British English dipthong /ɪə/ in the word ear? So, for example, ''ses'' would be pronounced /seəs/ or /sɪəs/?
Great question, what my ear hears, as a learner of Swedish, is that 'vi ses' would be pronounced as /si3s/ (3=schwa) as you suggested ( don't have the phonetic alphabet on my keyboard ). That's how I hear it.
@@tlilvanilla1845 That's very helpful. Tack så mycket!
@@mariak2698 No worries, please double check as I am a learner as well so I may be wrong.
2:09 Oh dear... I'm afraid the flat American 'a' in 'cat' (& 'lap,' 'sat,' 'back') does not sound to me *at all* like the long/short 'ah' of 'svär' & 'ärta.' For the American, flat 'a' I'm stretching my lips long across my face in a smile/grimace shape (showing my teeth). For the 'ä' sound, I'm opening my mouth & rounding a bit, like short Swedish 'a' (sounds like being at the dentist: 'ah'). Any tips for this?
Hello. Thank you for making these videos. I have a question which might not be directly relevant to this video, but I don't know where else to ask. Nowadays, there are many videos teaching Swedish pronunciation in my native language. However, none of them is based on IPA because most of our people don't even know what it is. Since our language doesn't have [eːᵊ] and [oːᵊ] as phonemes, nor it has any letters to represent these sounds, most of them teaches us to pronounce /eːᵊ/ and /oːᵊ/ as [ia̯~iə] and [ua̯~uə] (which are diphthongs in our language). So in those videos the words se, lek, sked, nå, åt, kol, Umeå would be taught to pronounce approximately like [sia̯, lia̯k, kwia̯d̥, nua̯, ua̯t, kʰua̯l, 'ʉːmɛˀua̯] respectively. Do you think it is a right approach? Or it would sound closer to the Swedish [eːᵊ] and [oːᵊ] if they opted for simply [eː] and [oː] instead?
I'm glad the videos are helpful! It's hard to give a definite answer without knowing more, but I would most likely opt for the simple /e: o:/, since the diphthongization is weak-ish to begin with, not present in all dialects, and perhaps most importantly, not perceived by native speakers to begin with. Might I ask what your language is?
Academia Cervena Thank you. It's Thai language.
Would you say short "ä," like in the example 'bäst" is actually pronounced like the American equivalent, 'best?' The short "ä" sounds to me indistinguishable from American 'e' as in 'get,' 'pen,' etc. I'm at 1:48, btw.
I suggest you use [] for talking about allophones and peculiarities. // Is used for phonemic transcriptions
I'm crying
hello! I was wondering if you could recommend any phonolocal dictionary of swedish? & in any case any dictionary Swedish - english ? any as good as wordreference but in swedish?
For dictionaries available online with pronunciation, I'd recommend lexin2.nada.kth.se/lexin (multilingual) or possibly g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob (Swedish only). Neither uses IPA, but it's what's available. Wiktionary sometimes gives IPA for Swedish words, but many entries are lacking. As for a generic Swedish-English dictionary online, I suggest www.ord.se or tyda.se . Hope it helps you!
How do you get that sound of the long 'i' and 'y'? I can't seem to make that noise with my mouth... It sounds kind of nasally, like you have a cold or something. What shape does the mouth make and where is the tongue?
I think I'm getting kind of closer by making an 'L' sound, but instead of the tip of the tongue flipped up against the back of the top teeth, it's flipped down behind the back of the bottom teeth and then trying to make an 'ee' sound. Does this seem right?
The tongue is usually somewhat fronted with those sounds, so making them a bit closer to a /j/ sound should probably help :)
I thought my problem could be that I would not be able to distinguish "Y" and "U", but it turns out to be that I cannot distinguish "Y" and "I" when I close my eyes and just listen to you. My own language also has the front "Y" sound but the swedish one just sounds so like the "I" because I could not hear the lip-rounding phenomenon. I don't know why but it's just so shocking.
I speak Mandarin and I found the French "u" is more like Mandarin "ü".
Great vid, I always come back to it when going back to my swede lessons in duolingo. Just a remark: Isn't the english "u" of "but"/"run"/"hurt" close enough to swedish "ö"? As french is concerned swedish "ö" is more similar to the french sound of "jeune" or "beurre", which is what we use to learn this english "u" sound. The sound of "peu" o "jeu" or "DepardiEU" is with a tighter mouth, closer to a "u". With all due respect, your french "peu" sounded to me like an english "puh" ;p.
Thank you! There is a slight mismatch between how Swedish Ö is traditionally described (/ø/, peu vowel) and how it's actually pronounced in the central regions (/œ/, jeune vowel), so you're right about that. I disagree about the English u vowel (as in 'run', /ʌ/), because that's a central vowel, notably different from the Swedish ö. The fact that French people perceive them as similar is interesting though. Swedish speakers perceive Swedish short 'u' (as in 'hund') as closer to the English vowel in 'run'.
how did you learn all this?
Reading, listening, analyzing :)
Academia Cervena you’re brilliant
It looks very complicated. Is it predictable from spelling when a vowel is long or short (as in Dutch for example) ?
Generally, yes. It's kinda like in Dutch but the other way around. I've made a video about it called _Predicting Swedish Vowel Length_ :)
Lol your Swedish LONG Ö is the German SHORT Ö (just faster spoken), and our LONG Ö is even mroe rounded. Thats a nice language hack :D
Thats why polyglots tend to learn languages faster: you have been through all types of vowels sounds, and and rely on them. Brazilian portuguese uses various of these sounds and inflections, without the french accent that are in some.
I now understand where all my misspellings come from. Curse you o/å and short e/ä!
You can say that "ö" most closely relates to the "ea" in "earn", right?
+Shortninja66 spot on!
+Shortninja66 My first thought would be to relate Swedish 'ö' with the vowel 'e' in English _get_, but with rounded lips!
Is that pretty much how the vowels in Norwegian are also pronounced? Or at least phonemically?
Essentially, yes. Phonetically (very simplified), Norwegian short vowels have the same quality as the long ones, which aren't diphthongized. So the system is pretty much the same, just not as messy :)
@@AcademiaCervena Thank you! I had noticed that they also have the "O" problem lol
I liken the ö sound to the way some commonwealth english speakers say the r sound in some words. Ex: "öl" sounds to me like how an English person would say "earl" but with more rounded mouth. I might be way off, but it helps me to approximate the sound.
I don't know why i'm studying this, too late to give up
If I may be prescriptive, E and Ä are not supposed to be the same before R. While Ä becomes [æ(ː)], E becomes [ɛ(ː)] (that is, the same as Ä when it's not before an R). That being said, there are some people who do confuse these two vowels before R, especially in writing. Verk (piece of work) vs. värk (pain) is a classical example.
This looks like a hypercorrection to me. Do you have any sources? I've never once heard or heard of such a pronunciation. Both modern phonologies (e.g. Riad 2013) as well as older ones (e.g. Elmquist 1915) agree that /e/ and /ɛ/ merge into [æ] before /r/. Besides, in the case of verk/värk, the difference in spelling is not etymologically justified either-they both have a historical /ɛ/.
Academia Cervena I stand corrected. I tried to look up various sources that I know I had looked at in the past, but they either said nothing at all about /e/ before /r/, or only said that long /eː/ and /ɛː/ are differentiated. Maybe it was the long versions I was thinking of.
There certainly is room for confusion regarding these vowels. Short /e/ and /ɛ/ were historically differentiated in the standard language but aren't anymore (although many people still do). Long /e:/ and /ɛ:/ are differentiated in the standard, although until recently they were merged too in the Stockholm area. Both short and long /e ɛ/ have always (in recent times, that is) merged into [æ] in the standard and in the Central Swedish speaking regions, however, whereas many dialects elsewhere don't do this at all. :)
intimidating
9:20 actually i think this makes /u:/ exactly like in japanese, with the compressed lips :D
They are the same in that regard, but I think the Japanese /u/ is somewhat more centralized!
For me, swedish "U" sounds the same as the japanese "U". Am I right?
The type of lip rounding is the same, but the Swedish vowel is further to the front of the mouth.
and write it phonetically so I can see the difference?
would you agree that Swedish is the most difficult european language in terms of pronounciation?
If you could crank it up a bit it'd be good. As an example, here is a video with a good sound volume: kzhead.info/sun/ftiGkpmXg3psgKc/bejne.html
Thank you for the video. I hope we can see your mouth while saying those words so that we can better understand the different kinds of lip rounding.