Rivstart Swedish Textbook Series Full Review
When someone asks me where they should start with learning a new language my response is always something along the lines of:
- Get a “main” resource
- Find places to consume native content & sentence mine
As simple as that sounds, it can be difficult at the start. When I refer to a main resource, I’m talking about something that will become your go-to thing to refer back to, and plan your studies around. Your vademecum, which you find engaging or inspiring and will give you some structure to progress through your studies. It could be a textbook, a series of study guides, a library of audio lessons, and even a teacher.
The most important part is that this source is relevant to you, comprehensible, and works well with your learning style — and that can be difficult to find.
Now for textbooks, I can be SUPER picky. Especially since they are often a big financial investment. Considering that, I want to start reviewing more books to help you make the right choices for you, too.
*Keep in mind that choosing a study resource is a highly individual process, and you should think about your unique situation, goals, and mind while contemplating your purchase.
In my textbook reviews, I access the following criteria:
- Comprehensibility
- Vocabulary Relevance
- Self-Study Optimisation
- Overall Impression (Good & Bad)
Rivstart is a bit of an odd book series and I feel extremely different about each book. When I first started using the series in 2020, I was pretty sure our relationship would not go very far. But, as I progressed with the books (as a part of a class I was taking at the time) I realised some interesting things that kind of changed my mind.
Rivstart A1-A2
The Textbook:
In the table of contents, each chapter is given a theme, a practical goal, and a technical goal. I think this seems promising, but in actuality, you don’t feel that embedded into the actual chapters themselves.
Rather, each chapter is comprised of seemingly random exercises that aim to teach those goals. As the book progresses it incorporates more short texts and dialogues but there’s no consistent pattern to this; which means in practicality, you feel like you’re just completing random exercises, and it's difficult to really identify your progress when you’re studying on your own.
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The Workbook:
The workbook follows the initial structure and goals of the textbook, but the exercises are clearly marked to tell you what grammatical structure of language element you’re working on. It features a short summary or clarification of the rules before throwing you into the exercise. This is much more clear and useful in my opinion, and I barely used the textbook because the workbook gave such clarity.
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Rivstart B1-B2
The Textbook:
In the B1+B2 textbook, they do away with the practical goal and give the chapters a theme, a practical goal, and a writing goal. The writing goal is the new addition, probably trying to get the students to begin outputting at a more complex level. The writing goals introduce different types of ‘output’ or writing, argumentative texts, letter formats, dialogues, or work with social statistics. This work seems to be geared towards preparing the student for Swedish societal settings, education in Swedish, and perhaps working in Swedish.
The textbook focuses much more on processing content surrounding themes — which is really good for a B1-B2 learner. The exercises, however, are optimised for a classroom setting. Still, I think the abundance of good, level-constrained content & context makes it really valuable for self-studiers working to achieve their goals.
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Overall Impression (Good & Bad) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Workbook:
This workbook focuses entirely on the different points of Swedish grammar and helps you drill that. It’s honestly incredibly boring but was a necessary evil in my case. I didn’t have fun doing it and liked it less than the A1-A2 but I can’t deny that this workbook’s repetitiveness did help. It doesn’t have as many nice summaries as the A1-A2 workbook though. It doesn’t have as many nice summaries as the A1-A2 workbook though, and the sentences and vocabulary choices were bland.
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Overall Impression (Good & Bad) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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Rivstart B2-C1
The Textbook:
This text has significantly fewer chapters than the previous books and does away with both the technical & practical goals. Now, we just have themes and writing goals. At this point, the book is teaching the student how to process higher-level information and respond to it in a deep, standardised way. That means, not only in casual communication style but in acceptable, academic, or professional prose.
Honestly, this book is a bit boring to study on your own. It’s largely targeted content. The content curation for the book is absolutely fantastic but the exercises are just laid out in plain text and that can be hard to push yourself to work with.
Structure ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Vocabulary Relevance ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Self-Study Optimisation ⭐⭐⭐
Overall Impression (Good & Bad) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Workbook:
Once again, the workbook impresses me. The structure is similar to all the rest except the sections are a bit more repetitive and some are specifically dedicated to practising a particular set of verbs. There are lots of information tables that summarise and explain grammar better than the textbook which is kind of weird. Anyway, this workbook confirms that if you’re going to buy into the Rivstart system, you absolutely need the workbooks.
Structure ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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Self-Study Optimisation ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Overall Impression (Good & Bad) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Overall, I think Rivstart is the most comprehensive textbook system for Swedish out there currently.
Do I think it’s amazing like the best or easiest thing for self-study?
Noooo. No, I don’t. But it still can be useful.
Swedish is still a very small niched-language in terms of SLA studies, and most of the people studying it have very specific goals of going to school there or integrating into society, so most of the textbooks available are not yet optimised to the hobby students out there. In order to really do well with Swedish, I recommend trying out the Rivstart series (especially the workbooks) and joining a community space or tutor where you can ask questions as you go along. It will also be very important to consume more casual and varied media online, not just the textbook, because most textbooks are optimised to teach academic and formal Swedish, so to train conversational fluency you will need a lot of outside input also.
I hope this helps someone on their Swedish journey! Har det bra vänner!
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