Home  ›  From English  ›  to Swedish
🇬🇧 → 🇸🇪

How easy is Swedish for English speakers?

Going from English to Swedish (Svenska) has a composite linguistic distance of 42% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

42% distance FSI Cat I (Easiest) — 600–750 hours
Lexical similarity
45%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
72%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
0%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
70%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

Open the interactive comparison →

Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇬🇧 English
The summer night is short and the light lasts until midnight.
🇸🇪 Swedish
Sommarnatten är kort och ljuset varar till midnatt.
🇬🇧 English
My mother reads books and my father writes letters.
🇸🇪 Swedish
Min mor läser böcker och min far skriver brev.

Curated cognates between English and Swedish

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

Other easy languages for English speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from English:

Think you can tell them apart?

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