On Friday studied I Swedish.

So I've been studying Swedish for the last three weeks. First off, they have three extra letters: å, ä, and ö. This leads to more vowel sounds. So far, I've been unable to really distinguish between all of the vowel sounds. (Each vowel can be said as a short of long vowel.)

There are a number of strange rules (at least to me) regarding word order and gender. First, there are n-gender and t-gender nouns. And there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason as to which nouns are which gender. There is one rule to remember gender: living things are n-gender, expect for a child, that's t-gender ('ett barn'.)

If you say 'an adventure' or 'a constellation,' you say it the same as you would in English: 'ett äventyr' and 'en stjärnbild.' But if you say 'the adventure' or 'the constellation' it changes to 'adventure the' ('äventyret') and 'constellation the' ('stjärnbilden'.) This creates great words like 'universitetet' ('the university'.)

Another interesting rule is about word order. The verb is always second (except sometimes it comes first in a question.) Where I would say 'On Friday I studied Swedish,' in Swedish you say 'On Friday studied I Swedish.' ('I fredag studerade jag svenska.') To me this always sounds a bit like a question.

And there is a short introduction to some of the weird rules of Swedish.