How to pronounce å, ä and ö

Åå
What you could think of here is the English word "afford". The 'o'-sound is very close to what 'å' sounds like. A fun fact is that "ha råd med" in Swedish means to afford something, so the word "råd" actually contains the letter defined here. "Råd" by itself means "a piece of advice".

Å - Stream (the noun)
Åkomma - Disease
Råtta - Rat
Får - Sheep
Påle - Pole

Ää
The word "hair" works well for this letter. "Här" sounds exactly the same (except for our r's, of course) and means "here".

Ärlig - Honest
Träd - Tree
Kärlek - Love
Färdighet - Skill

Öö
Think of the vowel sound in words like "bird" and "girl". That's the closest sound I can think of that resembles 'ö'. By itself, "ö" means "island".

Öva - Practice
Försöka & pröva - Try
Ödslig - Deserted, desolate
Frö - Seed

MP3

Sk-, Skj- and Stj-words

So, time for the other part of different sounds. There are three different spellings for the one I'm about to demonstrate:

Skjorta (shirt)
Stjärna (star)
Skära (to cut something)

These sound the same when pronounced. Again, it's difficult for me to explain how it sounds, but the nearest I can get might be something like "whh".
All words spelled with Skj- and Stj- that I can think of, sounds like this. Some nouns spelled with Sk- doesn't use that sound, though, like these:

Sko (shoe)
Skola (school)
Skåp (cupboard)
Skapa (create)


More Sk-, Skj and Stj-words to learn:

Skinka (ham)
Sked (spoon)
Skylt (sign)
Skinn (skin)
Skjuta (to shoot)
Stjärt (bottom)

MP3

K-, Kj- and Tj-words

The Swedish language is known for its variety in pronunciations for words that might look like they're pronounced the same. Long sentence there, sorry :) I hope you get what I mean. I'll give an example:

Käpp (cane)
Kille (guy)

The first word is pronounced with a "schh"-sound, and the other one uses a normal "k"-sound.

Another example:

Kyrka (church)
Tjära (tar)

In thise case, it's a bit trickier. These two words have different spellings, but sounds the same in the beginning. Unfortunately, I can't write down the phonetics for these so you'll have to listen carefully to the mp3-file.

More words that has identical initial sounds:

Kjol (skirt), Tjock (fat), Tjuv (thief), Kind (cheek), Kön (sex, gender)

Eventually, by reading this, you might know how to pronounce certain words as they're spelled.
Next time I will go through a different, but similar thing; The Skj- and Stj-sound.

MP3