How to Use Skumtomte

by Erik Wilhelm Gren

Basic Usage

The entire website should be seen as a book: There are parts with chapters and each chapter covers a specific topic. While the book is layout in a specific order, you don’t need to read it in order. This being said, I still recommend most users to read every article in order.

Some articles continue on topics started in the previous chapter and so on. However, Skumtomte has articles of varying difficulty and the goal is to have articles relevant to anyone learning Swedish, regardless of previous experience. Therefore, feel free to navigate the articles and find topics that are useful to you and your needs.

A quick note on mobile devices: While the website is designed with both mobiles, tablets and desktops in mind, there simply isn’t enough screen real estate on most mobile devices. I therefore recommend you to use a laptop or desktop for longer studying sessions since I believe you will get a better experience using such devices.

Every article begins with the title, author and published/updated date. On computer, there is a sub-menu on the right with a table of contents of the current article. There, you can click on each heading within the article to quickly navigate it.

In the hamburger-menu in the top-right corner (on the left side of the article on computer), you will find a tree-view of the entire website. Each post is categorized under General Category > Sub-category > … > Topic > Article Name. The current article should be highlighted.

At the bottom of every post, there is a section with simple next/previous article buttons. These are represented with links << for previous and >> for next. The links are added by the author of the article and points to the next article under the same topic or the first article of a new chapter.

Visual Hints

Every article uses a set of visual hints and colors to more easily convey messages. Here is a comprehensive list of every visual cue that an article could use:

Links

Links are yellow and look like this.

Footnotes

Whenever you see this: ^[1], it means that there is a footnote related to what has just been stated. Footnotes contain useful information with clarifications, links to continued discussion and much more. Feel free to read these by clicking on them (or hovering with your mouse on computer), or to just ignore them completely. They will always show up at the end of every article with a link to what in the page the footnote refers to.

Examples

In many cases, especially in grammar-heavy articles, there can be lots of example sentences involved. Each example has a sentence written in Swedish and one translated into English directly after it.

The English translation will most likely be correct. However, sometimes the translation will be more literal in order to more easily convey the exact meaning of the Swedish sentence. Usually, these literal translations contain the word “lit.” or some sort of footnote.

Examples look something like this:

Det här är ett exempel.

This is an example.

Yellow examples refer to good examples with correct grammar and natural-sounding expressions and sentences. Red examples refer to bad usage of words, incorrect grammar, or otherwise unnatural sentences. They look something like this:

Det här är en exempel.

This is a example.

Highlight will be used to underline or emphasis an error or the related grammatical topic.

ett exempel

an example
en exempel

a example

If there is an error in the example (red boxes), the error will be “translated” into English. This is not always possible. However, I will try my best to put emphasis on exactly what is wrong and how the “same sort” of error would look in English.

Questions

Sometimes I provide quizzes, practicing exercises or general questions where I want to hide the answer. These look like the following:
(To reveal the answer, hover or click on the black box)

Tables

Tables are used for large data-sets, conjugations of verbs/adjectives/adverbs/nouns and much more. For example, when conjugating the adjectives “bra” and “rolig” (meaning “good” and “fun”/“funny”), it might look something like this:

Positiv	Komparativ	Superlativ
bra	bättre	bäst
rolig(t)	roligare	roligast

Abbreviations

Sometimes, long words and names of grammatical concepts are repeated and abbreviating them is helpful. An abbreviation looks like this:

SAOL

On mobile, the definition is put in parentheses directly after. On computer, you can simply hover over the abbreviation with your mouse to see the full definition.

This is a simple footnote for demonstrative purposes. ↩

Skumtomte