Learn Swedish

Swedish diplomats bungle their way through a campaign for a seat nobody should trust them with. An SVT production, so it sits with everything else on SVT Play. Office comedy means ordinary conversational Swedish rather than crime-drama mumbling.

Bill Skarsgård as Clark Olofsson, the robber whose hostages gave Stockholm syndrome its name. A Netflix production, stylised and unreliable on purpose. Better than it had any right to be.

A prince is sent to boarding school and falls for a scholarship student. Made by Netflix, and it being Swedish is what got me to watch it; my wife needed no such excuse. Teenage register, clearly spoken.

A body on the Øresund Bridge, half in each country, so the two police forces have to share it. The Swedes speak Swedish, the Danes Danish, and neither side switches.

A consultant and a young IT technician dare each other into escalating misbehaviour inside a publishing house. Another Netflix production, and its subplots and supporting cast carry as much of it as the dare does.

The 1969 series, and still the version Swedes mean when they say Pippi. Slow, over-enunciated children's television from before anyone worried about pacing.

Swedish songs and nursery rhymes for small children. Repetitive by design, which is the same reason it works on adults who have been studying for three weeks.

The food channel Mauri is best known for. He also runs Topp 1 i Sverige and a personal channel, Maurisyoutubekanal. Unscripted, fast, and full of the slang that textbooks pretend does not exist.

Variety and comedy, mostly him talking straight to camera about whatever he has got himself into that week. Unscripted and quick, with no second speaker to carry a scene when you lose the thread.

Variety and reactions. Reaction formats are unexpectedly good practice: the same person talks over familiar material, so you can follow the Swedish without also tracking a plot.

Myth retold at length, an episode to a figure or a cycle, Norse and otherwise. Not updated recently, but the back catalogue does not expire and the storytelling register is slow and deliberate.

Named for the wartime propaganda poster, and mostly concerned with Sweden's twentieth century: neutrality, the war years, and the things the country has been slower to discuss.

Swedish history, concentrating on the parts that involved blood, which is most of it. Two hosts talking to each other rather than a scripted narration, so the register is conversational throughout.

A Sámi girl at a 1930s Swedish boarding school is measured, catalogued and told what she is. An unflinching look at one of the darker parts of Swedish history. Partly in Southern Sámi.

The Lindqvist adaptation, and one of the few that improves on quiet. Sparse dialogue, long silences, a suburb in winter.

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander. A fantastic adaptation of the books, released theatrically as three films and later cut into six longer television episodes; the extended version is the better one.

A centenarian absconds from his nursing home and the twentieth century turns out to have happened largely because of him. Very fun, and the sequel holds up.

Bill Skarsgård again, this time as a young man with Asperger's trying to find his brother a girlfriend. Included partly to keep hammering on the point that Bill Skarsgård is Swedish.

A knight plays chess with Death. The Swedish is archaic, theatrical and deliberately austere, so it carries very little of the modern language.