About this site
Sweden For Real is a blog launched in October 2024 by me, Lena. The idea is mainly to write about the boring ‘adulting’ things I've done or investigated deeply as an immigrant to Sweden. When I moved here in 2015, I found lots of articles about fika, the National Cinnamon Roll Day, funny Swedish words, and Sweden's beautiful nature — but not that much about getting a driver's license, voting, self-employment, taxes for hobbies that bring a bit of money, planning the budget for a parental leave or the formalities of buying a house. Not for people whose Swedish is not that good yet, anyway.
So, writing about exactly these boring things is what I'm doing here. The guides I write are kept up to date: you can see at the top of each one when it was reviewed last. Besides the guides, there are news and reports I summarize in English every week — I'm subscribed to the hot new stuff from Trafikverket, Migrationsverket, and the like, and I think it's worth sharing. Laws change, it's nice to know when they do.
Speaking of laws: none of the things I write is legal or financial (or god forbid medical) advice. It's just advice from one immigrant to the others, meant to save some time.
Last but not least, if you're reading this, you should probably stop. Eventually. What I mean by that is living in Sweden is much more awesome when your Swedish is good. So I hope I can help people who were once, like me, lost or unsure about the practical life details in this transitional period while they're learning Swedish. And since Swedish is so important, I'll share the tips, places, websites, books, and podcasts that helped me learn it. Here's a start:
Lena
If you find this stuff useful, you can subscribe either to the Guides, the News, both, or just the free articles of any kind. Your subscription makes this site possible. Thank you!
Maybe, if enough people subscribe, one day there'll be a podcast too; everyone in Sweden has a podcast after all :)
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Some articles are public just so that it's easy to see how they're usually written.
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