Attacking Swedish from every angle

 In addition to the Swedish classes we have attended, the course materials, and our three new words over breakfast endeavor, Swedish learning is a bit slow going.  Dave has continued reading comic books, and we find ourselves surrounded by Swedish and Swedes more than before.  But being able to translate half of the milk carton over breakfast doesn't seem to help when we hear someone speak.  When Swedish comes out of someone's mouth, you never know what it will sound like.  There are many dialects of Swedish and some are easier to understand than others.  But even without the added twist of dialects, understanding spoken Swedish quickly (or sometimes at all) is a challenge. 

Often reading material is a challenge because you don't know exactly what to look up.  Words are conjugated and many times compound of compounds are used.  Imagine instead of "little blue church" you read "littlebluechurch". Without knowing where one word ends and another starts, the dictionary is of little help.

Putting together a number of language learning tips passed along by people, we decided to get a Swedish book, its English translation, and the Swedish book-on-tape.  This way we could work on reading comprehension without the frustrating dictionary searches and practice our listening comprehension by trying to read along while we listen to the audio.  Given the recommendations from friends, we decided to try the Steig Larsson books.  Imagine our frustrations when we went to the book store and saw this:
The center book is the English translation of the first book in the series (as it very conveniently states on the top of the cover).  The translation of the book on the left is Man who Hates Women.  The book on the right is The Girl who Plays with Fire.  We needed the Swedish first book of the trilogy; which one is it?

Comments

[Patti]

I am 99% sure that the dragon tattoo is the first of the books.

[Jacob]

Hmm...I can understand the frustration but...

Can't you just open the English translation and find out? In Swedish books at least, the original title in the original language is printed on the same page where it's stated when this particular edition was printed etc.

Other than that, I presume going by your following post that you did find out that the book you were looking for was Män som hatar kvinnor? I say "presume", because not having read those books myself, I can't be sure that that's the book your reading.

[Julia]

Seems that the English translation took some liberties with formatting. The cover for the first book in English looks a lot like the second in the Swedish set (the one of the right in the photo). We were surprised to find that it was the book on the left that was the first in the set. So you are quite right, Jacob, that it was Män som Hatar Kvinnor that we were looking for.