Swedish for settling in Sweden
Learn Swedish from real Swedish
Learn a handful of words. Read a short illustrated story built only out of them. Meet those words again days and weeks later. And the whole time, the real thing — podcasts, news, video Swedes made for each other — sits next to the lessons, so you can watch it stop being noise.
Free, and invite-only — not to be exclusive, but because one person builds it and reads every mail.
The routine
Learn the words, then use them
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Learn some words
Ten or so at a time, grouped by subject: food, the flat, getting around. Most are voiced, on their own and in a sentence.
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Read a short story
Built out of words you've already met, so you can read the whole thing. Illustrated, read aloud, and one tap from the English if you need it.
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Write something back
A few questions that make you dig the words out yourself, rather than just recognise them.
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See it all again later
Words come back days later, then weeks later. Get one right and it waits longer. Miss it and it's back sooner.
A real story from the course
Erik äter allt
Min familj äter tillsammans, och idag är Erik hemma. Det är inte ofta.
Min mamma dricker te. Min pappa dricker kaffe, och jag dricker kaffe också.
”Äter du fisk, Anna?”
Nej. Jag äter aldrig fisk.
”Kött?” Nej. ”Ett ägg? Bröd med ost? En frukt?”
Ja, ja och ja.
Erik äter fisk och kött, bröd och ost, två ägg och en frukt. Erik äter allt.
Han dricker mjölk med kaffe.
Min mamma tittar på Erik. Min pappa tittar på Erik. Erik äter. ”Det är inte gott!”
Show the English
My family eats together, and today Erik is home. That is not often.
My mum drinks tea. My dad drinks coffee, and I drink coffee too.
”Do you eat fish, Anna?”
No. I never eat fish.
”Meat?” No. ”An egg? Bread with cheese? A piece of fruit?”
Yes, yes and yes.
Erik eats fish and meat, bread and cheese, two eggs and a piece of fruit. Erik eats everything.
He drinks milk with his coffee.
My mum looks at Erik. My dad looks at Erik. Erik eats. ”That is not tasty!”
- gott
- good / tasty
Press play: the words light up as they’re read and the picture turns with them · tap a word to jump back to it
Not a mock-up. This is a real passage from the beginner level, rendered the way the app renders it, and there's nothing in it you haven't been taught yet — which is what makes reading the whole thing possible this early.
Stories like this are the practice. What they're practice for is everything sitting next to them in the app: podcasts, video, music and news, all of it made for Swedes. Tell it what you're interested in and it leads with that.
Plenty of that will be over your head at first, and it stays in front of you anyway — that's how you notice it getting easier.
Compared with other apps
Why it's different
- Real Swedish from the first week
- Most apps keep you inside a walled garden of sentences written for learners, where you can feel fluent and understand nothing outside it. Here the podcasts, news and video sit beside the lessons from the start — Swedish that was never written for learners, which is the only kind that stops being noise.
- A word counts as known when you still know it
- Not when you tapped it right once. "Mastered" here means you recalled it after three weeks or more, and words that keep slipping away are labelled that way.
- No streaks, no hearts, no nagging
- Nothing here is engineered to make you open the app. Streaks are off by default, and there are no notifications built to guilt you back.
- Every number comes from something that happened
- A review you got right, a lesson you finished, a word you still knew three weeks later. Nothing is invented to make the screen look busier, which means the numbers are often unflattering: you'll always have finished more lessons than you have words you reliably remember, and both are on screen.
Where it leaves you
How far it goes today
Work through everything finished today and you come out at the far end of beginner Swedish — CEFR A1: 316 words taught and kept in review, 39 stories read, across 43 lessons. Short written Swedish about everyday things starts to make sense — a sign, a message, a note from school — and words you know begin surfacing out of speech that used to be a wall.
That's a beginning rather than fluency — no course reaches fluency in the seventy or so hours exam boards put A1 at. It's the floor everything above it stands on, and the next level is being written now.
- Beginner ready to use
- A full path from no Swedish at all to the end of the beginner material, with most of the words, sentences and stories voiced and illustrated.
- Elementary being written now
- There are lessons, but most will change before they settle, and none of it is voiced yet.
- Intermediate and up barely started
- A few lessons and some vocabulary. Not enough to work through yet.
Nothing here hears you. There's plenty to listen to, but no part of this judges how you sound. Speaking needs people — a conversation group, a course, a patient colleague. What this does is get you to where you understand what they say back, which is the half that makes the hour with them worth having.
Getting in
Get in touch
Nidova is free, and there's no waiting list, no signup form and no billing anywhere in the app. Invites are limited only because one person builds this and answers the mail. Write to nidovaapp@gmail.com, tell me who you are and why you're learning Swedish, and I'll write back either way.