Guides
Every guide to moving here is written in English and leaves you standing at a Swedish counter. These are written the other way round: the situation, and the Swedish that happens inside it.
Your first weeks
Personnummer, BankID, the housing queue, the health centre. The order they happen in, and the Swedish you meet at each counter.
Learning that sticks
How long to B1, what SFI does and does not teach, why the app you tried stopped working after three weeks.
When they answer in English
The single most common reason people in Sweden stop learning Swedish. What is actually happening, and how to hold the conversation.
Every guide to getting a personnummer is written in English. The counter is not. Here are the twelve words that appear on the form, on the website and in the questions you will be asked, with what each one actually means for you.
The most common reason people give up on Swedish while living in Sweden is that nobody lets them practise. It is not rudeness and it is not your accent. Here is what is actually happening, and the one move that changes it.
"About a year" is a useless answer, because it hides the only variable that matters. Here is what B1 costs in hours, what that means at ten, twenty or sixty minutes a day, and why most people's first estimate is wrong in both directions.
