When introducing and talking about yourself, you need only a few building blocks – tools which can be super powerful to kickstart your Swedish. We already talked about constructing simple sentences in an earlier lesson and if you’re still unsure on how to do that, check out the very first lesson first. You should also already know how to properly great someone in Swedish. We talked about that in lesson #4.
Heta
The big new thing we’re learning in this lesson is the verb heta. It’s used in conjunction with a name, to express that someone or something is named something.
Talking about age
Talking about one’s age is done in the exact same way in Swedish as in English. This means we can also leave out the same words.
In Swedish, gammal or år (or both!) can be omitted, and most people would just state their age without any extra words.
Naked nouns
Swedish is a Germanic language that uses articles and endings to determine if a noun is definite or indefinite. This isn’t supposed to be covered in this lesson, but it’s important to know here, especially if your native language need to use an article in this context, that when we speak about something general in Swedish, we omit the indefinite article. We thus say that we are “Swede” instead of “a Swede”. The article can still be used, but would then emphasize that we are one of many.