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🇩🇪 → 🇸🇪

How easy is Swedish for German speakers?

Going from German to Swedish (Svenska) has a composite linguistic distance of 40% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

40% distance FSI Cat I (Easiest) — 600–750 hours
Lexical similarity
55%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
61%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
13%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
70%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇩🇪 German
Der Winter ist kalt und der Sommer ist warm und hell.
🇸🇪 Swedish
Vintern är kall och sommaren är varm och ljus.
🇩🇪 German
Das Haus steht neben dem Fluss und hat einen großen Garten.
🇸🇪 Swedish
Huset står bredvid floden och har en stor trädgård.

Curated cognates between German and Swedish

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

Other easy languages for German speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from German:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between German and Swedish. No signup.