Language/Swedish/Grammar/How-to-Talk-About-the-Weather

How to Talk About the Weather

The Focus of this Lesson is on How to Talk About the Weather. 

Talk about the Weather

Det är varmt och skönt.

'"It's nice and warm."'

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In this lesson, we'll learn to talk about the weather. In a previous series, we learned how to comment on the weather by saying things like vilket fint väder ("what nice weather"). This is an easy way of commenting on the weather because the adjective fint ("nice") can be changed to any other adjective that describes the weather.

Let's look at some examples where we instead use the adjectives fult ("nasty") and underbart ("wonderful"):

1. Vilket hemskt väder."What nasty weather."
2. Vilket underbart väder. "What wonderful weather."

In this lesson's dialogue, other ways of talking about the weather were also used, like when Kerstin said, det är varmt och soligt ("It's warm and sunny."). In this lesson, you'll learn how to form sentences similar to this by using the formula Det är + [adjective] ("It's [adjective]."). Before we're able to use this formula, we also need to look at some suitable adjectives that can be inserted into it.

Swedish / English

• kallt / "cold"
• fuktigt / "humid"
• soligt / "sunny"
• disigt / "hazy"
• kyligt / "chilly"
• varmt / "warm"
• molnigt / "cloudy"
• kvavt / "stuffy"
• ruggigt / "chilly"

Now let's form some sentences that describe the weather using the formula Det är + [adjective] ("It's [adjective]") with the adjectives presented above.

1. Det är molnigt. "It's cloudy."
2. Det är varmt."It's warm."
3. Det är kallt."It's cold."

Sometimes we also want to use more than one word to describe the weather, and in that case, we can instead use the formula

Det är + [adjective] + och + [adjective] ("It's [adjective] and [adjective]."). And we insert two adjectives.

For example:

1. Det är molnigt och kvavt."It's cloudy and stuffy."
2. Det är varmt och fuktigt. "It's warm and humid."
3. Det är kallt och ruggigt."It's cold and raw." 

Air Temperature and Water Temperature

I luften är det 30 grader och i vattnet 20 grader.

"The air temperature is thirty degrees and water temperature is twenty degrees."

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In this lesson, we'll continue to learn how to talk about the weather, and we'll do that by talking about the air temperature and water temperature.

How to do this is illustrated in this lesson's dialogue. Let's have a look:

1. I luften är det 30 grader... "The air temperature is thirty degrees..."
2. ...och i vattnet är det 20 grader. "...and the water temperature is twenty degrees."

As you might have already noticed, the construction of the Swedish sentence and the construction of the English sentence differ a bit. In the Swedish sentence, we say i luften or i vattnet, which has been translated into English as "the air temperature" and "the water temperature." I luften and i vattnet, however, literally mean "in the air" and "in the water." "The air temperature" and "the water temperature" in Swedish are lufttemperaturen and vattentemperaturen, and it's perfectly fine to use these when talking about the weather. But in daily conversation, expressions like I luften and i vattnet are more common, and therefore, we'll learn how to form sentences using these expressions in this lesson.

Now that we've cleared this up, we'll move on to learn how to talk about the air temperature and water temperature respectively, and we'll start with the air temperature. In order to make it as simple as possible, we'll use the following formula: I luften är det + [the actual degree] + grader ("The air temperature is [the actual degree] degrees."). More specifically, this means that we can use this formula and only change the number of the degrees in the brackets.

For example:

1. I luften är det fem grader. "The air temperature is five degrees."
2. I luften är det fyrtiofem grader. "The air temperature is forty-five degrees."
3. I luften är det sjutton grader."The air temperature is seventeen degrees."

We'll now move on to learn how to talk about the water temperature, and we'll use a similar formula as the one above.

The formula we'll use is as follows:

I vattnet är det + [the actual degree] + grader.

("The water temperature is [the actual degree] degrees.").

Let's have a look at some sample sentences that use this formula.

1. I vattnet är det sju grader. "The water temperature is seven degrees."
2. I vattnet är det elva grader. "The water temperature is eleven degrees."
3. I vattnet är det tjugotre grader. "The water temperature is twenty-three degrees." 

Other Lessons

• How to Describe Someone's Appearance and Personality
• Adjectives
• How to Use Have
• Passive Voice
• When use Ett or En
• Prepositions
• Conditional Tense
• Indefinite Articles in Swedish
• How to Talk About How Something Smells
• Plurals
• Be Polite
• How to express disagreement
• Negations
• Future Tense