Beauties of learning Swedish…

28 comments
  1. Cheers to false friend words! Endless source of equal part cackle and pain for language students.

  2. Another good one is Tomten (Santa claus) and Tomten (Garden). Sentence “Tomten står på Tomten” meaning Santa is standing in the garden.

  3. Another good one is Tomten (Santa claus) and Tomten (Garden). Sentence “Tomten står på Tomten” meaning Santa is standing in the garden.

  4. I’m an electrician. When I went to school to become one we had visitors now and then from different countries. We had a new teacher that was gonna explain something about the unions in Sweden which is called “facket” for some teachers from Ireland. And he simply used “the fack” instead of ”the union” all the time. I got thrown out from class because I couldn’t stop laughing.

  5. The Swedish bank Götabanken wanted to be more international and renamed themselves Gota Bank. They wrote a letter to customers saying that they were “still the same guys even though we’ve lost our pricks”..

  6. It can get pretty wild in other Scandinavian languages too. The old Sims 3 Fast Lane pack was named Full Fart in Norwegian.

  7. I like when it’s store sale time in Sweden and there are signs proudly posted everywhere that say “SLUT SPURT”

  8. We also forget about the subtle difference of pronouncing “ch” and “sh”, which my cousin found out the hard way while giving a presentation. At the time he was living in San Francisco, designing charts for Facebook (I guess it’s Meta now).

  9. Swedish trains all end at a “slutstation” (end station) usually gets a few giggles when someone notices it for the first time.

  10. An Australian college of mine found it very funny that our road assistance vehicle’s had big sign on them with “Väg Assistans”

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