Adrienne asked a question about partikelverb, and because I’m such a good sport, I decided to blog about it today. Now say, I know it’s an impossible task to make partikelverb interesting, but hey, we can give it a shot, right?

So, what’s a partikelverb anyway? As the name suggests, it’s a verb and a particle put together. Those nasty little things are known as phrasal verbs in English.

The problem in Swedish is that you can have a genuine verb with a particle, and then you can have a verb followed by a preposition. And wouldn’t you know it? There’s a difference! Now, isn’t that special?

So how can you tell them apart? Well, since it’s Swedish, it’s gotta be by which word is being stressed. As I’m sure you know, Swedish is really big on the whole stress thingie.

With verbs and particles it works like that: the verb is not stressed, but the particle is.
With verbs followed by prepositions it works the other way round: the verb is stressed and the preposition is not.

Confused yet? No worries, it will only get worse. Remember when we were talking about the preposition “på”? I didn’t tell you back then that “på” can be both a preposition AND a particle. Like in this example:

  • hälsa på (stress on hälsa) = greet someone

    • Since the verb is stressed that means we’re talking here about a verb followed by a preposition

and

  • hälsa på (stress on på) = visit

    • Since the particle “på” is stressed, we are talking here about a real partikelverb

This tiny little bit of stress on a different word can totally change the meaning of the phrase, as you’ve just seen above.

  • Jag hälsade på Adrienne (with the stress on the verb) = I greeted Adrienne. (as in: said hello to her)

and

  • Jag hälsade på Adrienne (with the stress on “på”) = I visited Adrienne. (as in: went to her house and had fika together)

Fortunately, this is just the only one of the more extreme examples I can come up with right this moment. Your average, normal partikelverb are rather boring. And sadly, there’s only one way to learn them – you need to sit down, make a list and memorize those little suckers.

If you want, we can do it together. Every so often I can prepare a batch of partikelverb and their English equivalents and while I can’t promise you that it will be exciting, I’ll try to do my best to make it fun. Sort of fun. Because really, how fun can phrasal verbs be?


If you can get it, this might be of help:

“Se Upp!: Svenska Partikelverb” by Hans Holmgren Ording and published by Natur och Kultur in 1998 (supposedly re-released in 2002).
# ISBN-10: 9127504735
# ISBN-13: 978-9127504738

Sadly, the book is out of print. But if you can dig it up somewhere, it could be useful. It discusses 169 Swedish phrasal verbs and also distinguishes between true phrasal verbs and verbs followed by prepositions (just like I showed you above).