One of my Swedish textbooks has a section at the beginning with useful websites for Swedish learners. A couple of these are Swedish newspapers and radio online. If you are studying Swedish, or know someone who is, you might want to check these out:

1. 8sidor – http://8sidor.lattlast.se/ – 8sidor has daily news in Swedish. But not just any Swedish news, EASY Swedish news. To translate what my textbook says about it: “8sidor broadcasts news in easy Swedish, both in audio and print format. This is frickin’ badass (最適) for developing listening comprehension skills.” The transcriptions are exact and there are about 6-10 stories read aloud daily. They keep their archives up too, so you can go back and listen to the news from the past.

   I’ve been starting my mornings listening to 8sidor three times before breakfast and I listen to it a few more times at the end of the day. I am not at a level to where I can understand completely yet, but i can get used to the sound of the language and try to pick out as many words as I can (English cognates especially). I think next week I’m going to start printing out the transcriptions daily to study and add into Anki (with the audio!!). Look for the big microphone with the word “LYSSNA” on the right sidebar.

2. Sveriges Radio – http://www.sr.se/ – online Swedish radio. They have over 40 channels all in Swedish with everything from news to comedy to children’s programming. Most of it is targeted at Swedes but they have a program called Klartext that has news (audio and text) in easy Swedish, much like 8sidor. You can catch it on channel P4 at 6pm Swedish time, or access already aired shows here.

   I haven’t made this site part of my daily routine yet, mostly because its so vast that I haven’t found my favorite programs yet. I sometimes set up my computer to play random channels as background noise though. And the children’s programs are fun to listen to as well.

3. Lexin – http://lexin.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/swe-eng – Not Swedish radio, but I guess it deserves a mention since any learner of Swedish will have use of an online dictionary. Lexin is a great online dictionary and it’s not only for English-Swedish/Swedish-English. They also have Swedish/Spanish, Swedish/Arabic and about 10 more languages. I usually have this open in a separate tab and I will paste words from 8sidor news into Lexin for a quick look-up.

That’s all! Do you know of any online media resources for Swedish? How about another language you are studying (Spanish? Polish? Mandarin? News in Sanskrit?)? If so, please drop a comment, especially if you know of a site similar to 8sidor but for Japanese. ;)

Related posts:

1. Starting Swedish
2. Japanese and Swedish Peek-a-boo
3. My Current Strategies For Language Learning
4. Multilingual Parenting
5. Going Monolingual

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