My daughter Alicia and I have had the opportunity to try SMUL Academy’s new learning material “Vår svenska” for a full year.
“Vår svenska – a textbook” is an accessible learning resource with text by Maria Diemar and illustrations by Ella Quesnel. Alicia attends an international school with English as the main language, Thai and Mandarin Chinese as additional languages, and in her free time she goes to music school—and English is our everyday language at home. With such a packed schedule, time is almost fully taken up even before Swedish. We needed something extra to fit Swedish in naturally as well, without competing with other things or frustrating Alicia, which we had experienced previously when we tried on our own without a textbook and fixed routines.
The solution was to adapt the studies to our everyday life, and this is what it looks like today:
On weekdays, we drive to the international school in the morning and it takes about 30 minutes—perfect with Vår svenska in the car. I now sit in the back seat with Alicia and we study the printed pages together, pen in hand. I read first and she reads after me. Alicia does the exercises in the book and gets my immediate feedback. Since everything is new, she needs me all the time, but because it is only 30 minutes, it does not become too demanding and Alicia usually finds it fun. In the afternoon it is the same—30 minutes again in the car on the way home.
Sometimes we also combine a short session with the learning material when Alicia has her afternoon snack. This creates regularity in everyday life, with short recurring study sessions that build her Swedish vocabulary. After just three months, both she and I noticed that she knows a lot, and it is easy to follow her progress through the exercises she does in the book!
At weekends, Mum gets to join in. She also wants to learn Swedish and is a beginner, and Alicia notices that she already knows more than Mum. So on Saturdays we talk based on situations—the dinner table, the kitchen, the living room—and we play Bird, fish, or somewhere in between, where I hide words in different places at home written in English and Swedish, and Alicia and her mum have to find the words and read the Swedish ones. I have taken the words from the textbook Vår svenska, so Alicia recognises them when she finds them!
The book is visual, hands-on, and easy to follow, with lovely illustrations and layout, which makes it appealing to use, and I can see that Alicia likes it. Are there really no difficulties or uphill stretches… are we living in a perfect world, or what? Of course not. There are challenges when Swedish is not your mother tongue, and for us they are linked to English as the mother tongue, which means Swedish pronunciation often has an accent. I do not solve that for her; instead, we say the words again and again until we agree that it sounds good enough, and then we move on.
It will be exciting to see when she becomes aware of how it sounds and tries to make it sound Swedish, all by herself. I am glad we are starting now—the sooner, the better.
The further we get in Vår svenska, the longer and longer the sentences become. Alicia reads and I listen and help with pronunciation from time to time. And we are making progress! The first time she adjusted her pronunciation on her own, it dawned on me that she now has a feel for the language—she heard her “Swenglish” pronunciation and corrected herself to proper Swedish pronunciation. What a joy for a Swedish parent!
The book’s everyday exercises are practical, useful, and fairly easy for her to do. But sometimes real life takes over, and there have been periods when we have not managed to study Swedish with the book every day. There is so much else that demands attention when you are eight… homework, music school, friends, and activities. But despite that, I have noticed that the resistance that was there at the beginning, because of everything else, has disappeared!
And now things have turned around—autumn 2026 we are planning for Alicia to have Swedish with friends for the first time, because she is registered through SMUL. Having friends to listen to and speak Swedish with is a really big deal when you are eight years old! And in summer 2027 we are travelling back to Sweden, so right now there is plenty of motivation to learn more Swedish.
When I look back on our work during this period with “Vår svenska”, the book has been a great support and a framework for her learning. There have been many varied exercises, with read-and-answer activities, and Alicia got to experience the feeling of being able to read longer passages in Swedish—and fun tasks such as making her own family tree, or singing and signing—each of them much-appreciated elements.
The tips at the end, with links to more material, are excellent and do not need to be more numerous. For our part, we combined reading the book in colour on screen with making black-and-white printouts to fill in and work with, and it worked very well. Alicia and I can warmly recommend this excellent learning resource.