The short answer
Learning Swedish, the free online beginner course run by the Swedish Institute, closed at the end of December 2022 and the Institute has said it will not open again. Nothing official replaced it: the Institute now supports Swedish teaching at universities abroad and does not arrange courses itself. That leaves three real routes for someone who has just arrived — municipal SFI once you are registered, a paid app or tutor, or free self-study — and the honest answer is that most people need the third one for the weeks or months before the first one starts.
What actually closed, and when
If you searched for how to start Swedish any time between 2015 and 2022, you were sent to the same place: Learning Swedish, the free online beginner course published by the Swedish Institute, the government agency for Sweden's relations with the rest of the world. It was structured, it followed the CEFR levels, it cost nothing, and it did not ask whether you lived in Sweden yet.
It closed at the end of December 2022. The Institute's own page says it will not open again, and that it does not arrange Swedish courses — its work on the language is now support for Swedish teaching at universities outside Sweden, which is a different job for a different audience.
Three years later, the recommendations have not caught up. Forum posts, relocation guides and university welcome pages still link to it, so a steady number of people arriving in Sweden today follow a link to a course that has not existed since before they decided to move.
Why the gap is real and not just inconvenient
Plenty of ways to learn Swedish exist. What disappeared was a specific combination, and it is worth being precise about it, because that combination is exactly what the first month in Sweden calls for.
It was free, which matters when you are paying two rents and a deposit. It was structured — a path with an order, not a pile of resources you have to sequence yourself while exhausted. It went to a stated level, so you could tell someone where you were. And it needed no personnummer, which is the thing nobody warns you about: the free municipal course, SFI, is tied to being registered, and registration takes as long as it takes.
That last point is where the gap bites. There is a stretch — often the first weeks, sometimes several months — where you are living in Sweden, hearing Swedish all day, and formally eligible for nothing. That stretch used to have an answer.
The three routes, and what each one actually costs you
SFI (Svenska för invandrare) is the real destination for most people: free, municipal, and it goes a long way. It is also gated on registration and, depending on where you land, on a queue. It is worth starting the paperwork the week you arrive rather than the week you feel ready — we wrote about how SFI compares with learning on your own separately.
A paid app or a tutor removes the waiting. A tutor on an hourly rate is the fastest way to be corrected by a human, and it is the only route that reliably makes you speak. It is also the one that stops the day you stop paying, and the monthly cost lands in the same month as everything else you are paying for on arrival.
Free self-study is what is left, and it is what most people actually do in the gap. The problem is that it is not one thing: it is a scattering of podcasts, YouTube channels, flashcard decks and news sites with no order between them. Doing it well means imposing a sequence yourself, which is precisely the work the closed course used to do for you.
| In Swedish | What it means | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Jag vill anmäla mig till SFI. | I'd like to register for SFI. | At the municipality's reception, or on the phone. The sentence that starts everything. |
| Hur lång är kön just nu? | How long is the queue at the moment? | The question that tells you how long the gap will be. |
| Vad behöver jag ta med mig? | What do I need to bring with me? | Ask before the appointment, not at the counter. |
| Finns det något jag kan göra under tiden? | Is there anything I can do in the meantime? | Municipal staff often know about free local options that are on no website. |
What to do in the gap, in the order that works
The mistake is to treat the waiting time as dead time and arrive at SFI having done nothing. The people who find the first weeks of SFI easy are not more gifted; they arrive with a few hundred words already in their heads, and everything after that is faster.
Get the sounds early. Swedish spelling is regular once you know what sj-, tj- and the vowels do, and getting them wrong for six months is much harder to undo than learning them in week one.
Learn the words of your own week, not the words of a textbook. The vocabulary of your commute, your shop, your workplace and your children's school is the vocabulary you will hear forty times a day, which is what makes it stick.
Read the news in easy Swedish daily. 8 Sidor has published news in easy Swedish since 1984, and Sveriges Radio's Radio Sweden på lätt svenska does the same in audio. Ten minutes a day on something that is actually happening beats an hour a week on a textbook dialogue.
Find a språkcafé. Libraries, churches and study associations run them free, and they solve the one thing no app solves: somebody who will wait while you finish a sentence. There is more on finding one here.
| In Swedish | What it means | When you use it |
|---|---|---|
| Har ni språkcafé här? | Do you have a language café here? | At a library. The most useful question you can ask in one. |
| Jag håller på att lära mig svenska. | I'm in the middle of learning Swedish. | Said first, it stops the switch to English before it happens. |
| Kan vi ta det på svenska? | Can we do this in Swedish? | Short version, for a counter or a till. |
| Var kan jag låna lätta böcker? | Where can I borrow easy books? | Libraries keep a lättläst shelf. Ask for it by name. |
What we built, and who it is not for
We built Svenska App for exactly that gap, because we kept meeting people in it. It is free, it is sequenced from your first hej to B1, it works without an account, and it does not ask whether you are registered yet. Sixty units, and a placement test at the start so that someone who already has some Swedish is not sent back to hej.
It is not a replacement for SFI and we would rather you did not treat it as one. SFI gives you a teacher, a classroom and a certificate, and none of those come out of a phone. Start the SFI paperwork the week you arrive. Use this while you wait, and alongside it afterwards.
It is also not for you if what you need is conversation practice with a human this week. That is a tutor or a språkcafé, and saying so costs us nothing: a course that pretends to be everything is how people end up with none of it.
Sources
- Learning Swedish — Svenska institutet2023-01-01
Rules and processing times change. Check the official page for your own case before acting on anything here.
Questions people ask
- Is the Swedish Institute's Learning Swedish course really gone?
- Yes. It closed at the end of December 2022 and the Swedish Institute states on its own site that it will not open again, and that it does not arrange Swedish courses. Links to it still circulate in relocation guides and forum posts, which is why people keep finding out the hard way.
- Did anything official replace it?
- No. The Swedish Institute's language work is now support for Swedish teaching at universities outside Sweden rather than a course for the public. For people inside Sweden the official route is municipal SFI, which is free but tied to being registered — so it does not cover the period before your registration comes through.
- Can I start learning Swedish before I move?
- Yes, and it is the single highest-return thing you can do with the months before a move. Nothing in Swedish self-study requires a personnummer, an address or a Swedish bank. Arriving with a few hundred words changes the first month more than any amount of preparation afterwards.
- How long does it take to get onto SFI?
- It depends entirely on your municipality and on how quickly your registration goes through, and anyone quoting you a single national figure is guessing. Ask your kommun directly, start the paperwork the week you arrive, and plan on there being a gap rather than hoping there is not one.
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