10 cool Swedish words and expressions (part 4)

I love the Swedish language, so I've featured posts on Swedish words before on the Charles Fudgemuffin blog, and this week it's time for another round-up of some of my favourite cool Swedish words and expressions...

"Ribbit!"

1) Teenage mutant ninja shield toads!

As I've highlighted in previous blog posts, the Swedish language has quite a few words which describe something in a creative manner, and the Swedish word for turtle also follows that pattern.

In Swedish, a turtle is known as a 'sköldpadda' which literally translates as a 'shield toad'. If you're being creative, then I suppose a turtle does kind of look like a toad with a shield on its back.

Modern Swedish words

Learning a new language is perhaps not as daunting as you might think.

This week I 'blogga' about Swedish words.

The thought of learning a new language can be intimidating, especially to English speakers, as we're traditionally not very good at learning new languages. However, if you want to learn a foreign language such as Swedish, then although it may seem daunting at first, you can take encouragement from the fact that a lot of modern words are shared between languages.

Technology in particular is one field where Swedish words are very similar to English, as you can see from the following list of Swedish words and their English equivalents...

1) googla ... to google
2) twittra ... to tweet
3) printa ut ... to print out
4) skypa ... to skype
5) facebooka ... to facebook
6) skanna ... to scan
7) blogga ... to blog
8) spotifiera ... to use spotify
9) websajt ... website 
10) logga in ... to log in

And if you want to test how your Swedish skills are progressing, see if you can work out this next one for yourself...

10 cool Swedish words and expressions (part 3)

A Swedish flag I saw hanging in a bar in Magaluf.

Two posts on the Charles Fudgemuffin blog which get a lot of hits are my '10 cool Swedish words and expressions' and its follow-up post '10 more cool Swedish words and expressions'. They say you should listen to your audience, so with that in mind here are ten more of my favourite Swedish words and expressions, featuring green carrots, dancing trains, and breast warts...

1) Breast warts

If someone refers to their bröstvårta, or breast warts, don't worry, they haven't been struck down with some Biblical contagious disease. In Swedish, breast warts are nipples. Perhaps not quite as appealing when they're described as breast warts, although admittedly still quite appealing.

2) Beards and cookies

An interesting Swedish expression is the phrase, 'Skägget i brevlådan,' which means to be caught with your beard in the letterbox, and is the equivalent of the American saying, to be 'caught with your hands in the cookie jar'. If you took the two sayings at face value then you might perhaps conclude that Americans are more likely to be greedy whereas Swedish people are more likely to be snoops. However, my experience of American and Swedish people wouldn't back that up at all, and I haven't met a great number of Swedish people with beards either, so I'm not quite sure where the inspiration behind this saying came from.

10 more cool Swedish words and expressions (part 2)

The creatively titled follow-up to '10 cool Swedish words and expressions'.

A few of my favourite Swedish words and expressions.

I love the Swedish language and as it’s been a while since my original '10 cool Swedish words and expressions' post, I figured it was about time I posted a few more of my favourite Swedish words and expressions.

Just to recap, many of the alien names and places in my first comedy scifi novel were inspired by Swedish words, so that was the inspiration behind the original post.

Anyway, here are another 10 cool Swedish words and expressions which I like…

1) You look good out

If you’re Swedish and you’re good looking (which admittedly is a very strong possibility judging by all the Swedish girls I’ve ever met), then luckily in Sweden they have several words and expressions to describe you. If I had to guess then I would say that the abundance of words for ‘good looking’ in Swedish is similar to the way that Eskimoes have numerous words for snow.

Santa Claus, camper vans and Swedish girls

An analysis of some unusual Google searches.

When most people think of Google they probably think first and foremost of the Google search engine, then maybe after that they perhaps think of things like Google Earth and Gmail.

Searching for Santa on Google.

However, another cool gizmo which Google have is the Google Keywords Tool which is a fun way to pass the time if you ever have a spare half hour or so (especially if you’re easily amused like me). It’s actually designed to help potential Google advertisers find useful key phrases to advertise on, but I use it to discover and explore some of the weird phrases that people actually search for on Google.

For example, did you know that every month 91 people actually search for:

10 cool Swedish words and expressions (part 1)

Fart bumps, poison marriage and eating barbed wire.

Caution: Posionous marriage!

I'm a big fan of the Swedish language, so I thought it would be fun to write a post on ten of my favourite Swedish words and expressions, starting with a word seemingly invented by an apparent love cynic.

1) Poisonous marriage

In Swedish, the word for married is 'gift' and this is also the word for poison.  Whoever invented Swedish can’t have had the most optimistic outlook on marriage.

2) Black sickness

‘Svartsjuk’ is the Swedish word for jealous and this literally translates as ‘black sickness’ which is an interesting way to describe jealousy.