Livre d'Or

The way in which Swedish marks the determine-ness of a noun (to pick on a recent example, boten vs bot) both baffles and intrigues me. Being Germanic means that strong verbs are par for the course, and just as in Dutch there are the really irregular ones floating around.

I'm very interested in the Swedish passive. My understanding is that the whilst Proto-Germanic had a "proper" passive (like amamur, we are being loved, in Latin), and that beyond that stage only Gothic preserved the morphological passive. Could you tell me some more about how this passive works? Is it morphological, or does it use some other auxiliary + something combination?

What you say about sentences ending with a preposition and phrasal verbs leads me to think of separable verbs (scheidbare werkwoorden in Dutch); in Dutch and German the only real difference from phrasals in English is how you list the infinitives in a dictionary :) Along that same vein, sometimes an infinitive can be separable, sometimes not - yes, the meaning changes - and the only way to distinguish them is where the stress lies. It's nowhere near the machinery Swedish seems to have, but it was something new I had to learn here. The example that springs to mind is voorkomen (to occur) and voorkomen (to prevent).

Adjectives...well! I just had to learn it. Could you tell me where the adjectives decline and when they don't? It'd be interesting to see how that compares with Dutch, which is basically a question of learning the noun's gender and understanding what "indefinite" means.

Dutch word order (which by and large is the same as in German) can take some getting used to; I remember a Portugese lady in one of my classes who had real trouble with subordinate clauses. But I gather from what you say that the Swedish situation is much more similar to that in English.

Anyway, time for me to stop babbling. Good to hear that you're enjoying the language!