Because Swedish and Dutch both belong to the Germanic languages, they show many similarities. This certainly goes for their vocabulary and also to a certain extent for the grammar. Many Swedish words are therefore recognisable for a native speaker of Dutch. This mainly goes for written language. In writing, some Swedish words are even practically identical to Dutch words. These Swedish words can however be confusing for the pronunciation, because they are pronounced differently. It is therefore very important to listen to the pronunciation very carefully in order to learn that difference correctly from the beginning. The difference in pronunciation between Dutch and Swedish mostly lies in the length of the sounds. This goes for both vowels and consonants. Swedish has, for example, a long and a short variant for almost every vowel and consonant. Dutch has no long consonants at all and only four vowels that have a long and a short variant (a, e, eu, o). And still, these long vowels in Dutch are only half-long in comparison with the long vowels in Swedish. This is of great importance for the intelligibility of Swedish. The second important difference between Dutch and Swedish pronunciation is the modulation and the intonation. Swedish has two different accents, whereas Dutch only has one accent, just like Danish, English, German, French and Russian, for example. Especially in the beginning, it is very important to learn the pronunciation correctly, because once you’ve learned it, an incorrect pronunciation is very difficult to unlearn.

The teaching material is divided into three parts:

– A general introduction about the best way to learn the pronunciation of the language;

– A short general description of the prosody: the musical and rhythmic aspects of the language;

– The practice material.