Language/Swedish/Vocabulary/How-to-talk-about-a-person's-appearance-or-personality

How to talk about a person's appearance or personality

In this lesson, we'll learn how to talk about a person's appearance or personality using a verb that we encountered in a previous lesson, namely, the verb att vara ("to be"). We'll start by looking at some of the sentences that appear in this lesson's dialogue, where either Jens or Erkan is talking about the appearance of Anders' current and ex girlfriends. Let's have a look at the sentences.

Examples from this dialogue:

Hon är söt. 

"She's cute."

Hon är jättesnygg. 

"She's really good-looking."

Hon var ful.

"She was ugly."

All of the sentences above use the same sentence structure. They all begin with the subject of the sentence, which in the examples above, is the personal pronoun hon ("she"). This is then followed by the verb att vara ("to be"), either in its present tense är ("is") or past tense var ("was"). Placed after the verb at the end of the sentence, is the adjective. In these examples, the adjective describes someone's appearance, but it's also possible to use adjectives here that describe someone's personality. The sentence structure we're going to learn can, therefore, be summarized in the following formula:

[Personal pronoun] + är + [adjective describing someone's appearance or personality].

Before we look at some concrete examples of sentences that follow this formula, it might be good to introduce some personal pronouns that can come in handy when you want to talk about someone's appearance or personality.

Personal pronouns / English translation

jag / "I"

hon / "she"

han / "he"

hen / "he / she" (Hen is a personal pronoun used only to refer to people, but it doesn't denote the gender of the person referred to.)

Now, let's use all of these pronouns together with some adjectives that are suitable to describe either someone's appearance or personality.

Examples

Jag är smart.

"I'm smart."

Han är ful.

"He's ugly."

Hon är dum. 

"She's stupid."

Hen är charmig.

"He/she is charming."

Apparence adjective / English translation / Personality adjective / English translation

vacker / "beautiful" / knäpp / "crazy"

fin / "fine" / trevlig / "nice"

stilig / "handsome" / otrevlig / "rude"

attraktiv / "attractive" / elak / "mean"

oattraktiv / "unattractive" / rolig / "funny"

Finish this lesson and explore these related pages: Feelings and Emotions, Swedish Vocabulary → Body parts and health → Symptoms and ..., Transportation & House.

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• Att tycka Att tänka Att tro
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