Posted by Anna Ikeda
It’s grammar time today, because we can’t have just fun and games all the time. I want you to learn something really useful here, even if only occasionally. 
When talking about “jobbig” I briefly mentioned the rules regarding Swedish adjectives. That when an adjective describes an “ett” noun, it gets a “-t” ending. And when it describes a plural noun, then the ending of that adjective gets an “-a”.
For example:
- grön = green, when used with “en” nouns, indefinite
- grönt = green, when used with “ett” nouns, indefinite
- gröna = green when used with plural nouns.
Seems simple enough. “But wait!” you may say. “It’s not that simple!”
And you are right. Unfortunately.
There are bunches and bunches of “irregular” adjectives, which do what they please. In some forms they change, or they don’t, or they change in a whole different way altogether.
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
It’s time for a little bit of grammar today, don’t you agree? And this particular bit of grammar is always confusing for English speakers.
People, Swedish people naturally, will tell you that Swedish nouns are classed according to gender. And it’s all good, except when you try to find out exactly what gender those Swedish nouns have. In most languages, when talking about gender, you come up with the usual of masculine, feminine, and neuter. But not so in Swedish. Here, there are only two choices, and they are defined by these two indefinite articles: en and ett.
Every noun is either an “en” or an “ett” noun, and which is which you have to learn the hard way by memorizing the appropriate article together with the noun. Why? That pesky indefinite article will show you how make the correct form of the definite article. It also comes up in other grammatical issues, involving adjectives, for example.
But for now, let’s stick to nouns. Why this is called “gender” I’m not really sure, because while some Swedish nouns do have both masculine and feminine forms, the article in front of such nouns is the same in both cases.
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