Lost for Words (But not for Laughs): My Brush with Swedish

Hejhej! Hur mår alla idag? (Hey, how's everyone doing today?)

On Day 29 of July's Sweden-themed UBC, I'm gonna teach you some Swedish. Or at least, tell you how I hilariously fumbled my way through it.

One of my favorite language memories is from a small Swedish bakery where I proudly tried ordering fika, the cherished Swedish coffee break tradition. I managed to say “två kanelbullar, tack” (two cinnamon buns, please), feeling like a total pro…

…Until the clerk asked me something else, and I completely blanked.
After a moment of confused blinking, I swallowed my pride and admitted in English that my Swedish was pretty basic. We both laughed.

She just wanted to know whether the order was for here or to go. 🤩
Honestly, I probably looked like a deer in headlights. I had rehearsed “två kanelbullar, tack” like it was my Oscar acceptance speech; only to get completely thrown off by what was essentially the Swedish version of “eat in or take away.”

I did end up eating there. Mostly because I panicked and sat down.

Photo by Lina Kivaka on Pexels

When my son Colin started taking Swedish lessons at school, I had this romantic idea of tagging along from afar. I downloaded Duolingo and picked up a dozen or so words“Hej!” and “hur står det till?” (Hi, how are you?) among them, but life, as it often does, took over.

Still, those few words made me feel a bit more tuned in as a visitor.
Of course, Duolingo was thrilled with me. It kept sending motivational messages like “You’re on fire!” while I was over here barely able to ask for the bathroom. Let’s just say I was more smoldering ember than fire.

As a German and English speaker, I can often guess the meaning of Swedish words when I read them; there are plenty of helpful overlaps and familiar roots. That’s the beauty of the German-English-Swedish Triangle—a lot of vocabulary lives in the same linguistic neighborhood.

Here are a few fun examples:

…And then there’s smörgås for sandwich, which still trips me up. In my brain, it sounds more like a sneeze than something you’d eat.

But hearing people speak? That’s a whole different game. The melody, the speed, those soft consonants, they leave me blinking in confusion and admiration. Interestingly, Swedes have done away with messy grammatical cases like dative and accusative, and as someone who’s wrestled with German grammar, I deeply respect that.

What I didn’t expect was how seriously Swedes take their language, even in international Stockholm. Sure, signs like “ingång” and “utgång” (entrance and exit) were easy enough to decode. But websites? Another story. I visited restaurant pages hoping for a little Union Jack icon to click for English; nothing. Just more long, poetic-looking food words and… vibes.

Take this actual menu item I stumbled across:

"Pepparglaserad kycklingspett med grön chiliaioli, somrig sallad med fetaost, bovete-furikake, frasig krossad potatis."

Even after running it through DeepL,  (Pepper glazed chicken skewer with green chill aioli, summery salad with feta cheese, buckwheat furikake, crispy crushed potatoes) I was still stuck on furikake.

Spoiler: it’s a Japanese-style seasoning mix. But at the time I wasn’t about to take chances. 

And yet, I love this kind of travel chaos.
These are the moments, trying to decipher a menu, sharing a laugh with a bakery clerk, stumbling over a phrase, that remind me why I love exploring. 

It turns a coffee break into a story.
It turns a wrong word into a shared smile.
And it turns a short visit into something you remember long after you’ve gone home.

Which local word or phrase from your travels has stuck with you and why?