Swedish, Day One

Off to a good start.

Today I'm learning the very, very basics of the language (I do know more, but this keeps it nice and compartmentalized): the personal pronoun system, the articles and numbers from one to ten.

The pronoun system looks almost like a copy of English. It's got your standard slew of subject pronouns (jag, du, han, hon, vi, ni, de), plus two "its" (one for each of Swedish's genders) den and det alongside han (he) and hon (she), an indefinite pronoun man which acts like old-timey one or French on, and, uh...that's it. There's nothing that doesn't have an exact counterpart in English, really, except for the two versions of it. There's object pronouns for each of those, plus a reflexive object sig, and possessives, which change according to the gender or number of the head noun (min mor, mitt bord).

All of it quite simple, and I've only tripped up on my post-learning quizzes once, when I mistakenly invented object forms *en, *et for den and det. (They don't exist- the objects are the same as the subjects). En and ett do, however, function as indefinite articles (what about definite articles? We'll learn what Swedish does later...). Then there were the numbers, which act almost exactly (exactly exactly? I am not sure) as in English: en/ett, två, tre, fyra...

This is all quite boring, however. What I'm sure you're looking to know is: how am I learning this?

First, I take the whole thing a day at a time. Today I'm slated to learn pronouns, the indefinite article and numbers 1-10, so that's what I'm learning. First, I write all the information down in a notebook, and revise it until I feel I've got it. I say the words out loud, count from one to ten to the wall, etc.

Then I write up the questions to a quick Swedish to English quiz on the next page, put the notebook away, and go do something else for half an hour. Then I take the quiz, check how well I've done (in this case I got them all right-yay), and write up an English to Swedish quiz. Then I do something else for two to three hours and take it (this was the quiz on which I misdid den and det)...and then slate another, slightly harder English to Swedish quiz on more or less the same thing, but with shuffled questions, another two or three hours away. 

Then I take that (tonight, scheduled for eleven o'clock or so), and then, tomorrow morning, I will sit down in front of a piece of paper and basically rewrite everything I learned today. And then I will start on what I'm supposed to learn on day two...you get the picture. It's unglamorous, but I can't just memorize vocabulary out of nowhere, I've found.

So far, there is one problem I foresee: I don't have a dictionary, just Wiktionary. That's fine for the first couple weeks, however, and I'm working on getting one. I also ought to find a better grammar sketch than what I can find on the Internet; but what I can find will do fine for a good long while.

I'd be very interested in feedback on the method (insofar as it is a method) from anyone who's self-studied on their own...whether Swedish or not.