<p>I think it's a fascinating but neglected region. When talking about Europe, most people are fixated on the Western countries at the expense of everywhere else on the continent. Most people are clueless about Scandinavian history, like the fact that the Swedish kingdom was actually once quite powerful, as most people have the 20th century image of Swedes being neutral socialists. </p>
<p>Anyway, I just wanted to know what it was like up there, especially given the fact that there's a remote possibility that I might go study there in the near future. Also, how inter-related are the Nordic languages? If you learned Swedish, would you be able to pick up Norwegian and Danish relatively easily (kind of like how the Romance languages are)?</p>
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<p>I've been to Finland twice and Sweden twice. I've changed planes in the airport in Denmark, but that doesn't count. I've never been to Norway.</p>
<p>I enjoyed both Finland and Sweden. The people were very pleasant and polite. The food was a little shaky - you can get served things like salad, cold cuts, and pickled fish for breakfast. </p>
<p>As for languages - Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are all pretty closely related, and I assume that there is some significant level of cross-understanding between them, but someone who is more fluent could answer that better than I can. Finnish is completely unrelated to the other three languages and looks like an incomprehensible alphabet soup with very long words. Finnish is closely related to Lapp and Estonian and distantly related to Hungarian.</p>
<p>Finns are perhaps the cleanest people on earth - with the regular saunas and all. In both Finland and Sweden it's very common for people, especially young people, to speak excellent English.</p>
<p>Also, there are good looking women everywhere in the world, but IMO Sweden has the highest percentage of really beautiful young women of any place I've ever visited. I thought Finland was great until I got to Sweden. There it's even better. In Sweden, all the good-looking women look more or less just like the hot blonde in ABBA in her prime:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.worldofkitsch.com/music/abba.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.worldofkitsch.com/music/abba.html</a></p>
<p>And all the good looking men look more or less just like Stefan Edberg:</p>
<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/tennis/5140402.stm%5B/url%5D">http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/tennis/5140402.stm</a></p>
<p>I've been to Sweden and Denmark. They do have some interesting history, I was actually kind of surprised. Did you know that Hans Christian Andersen (creator of the little mermaid, and also the guy who wrote a ton of children's tales which you've surely heard before) lived in Denmark?</p>
<p>Anyway, I don't know much about how related the languages are, but I know that in Sweden, they learn English in school. I don't remember if the same is true of Denmark though.</p>
<p>Haha, also coreur is right about the "percentage of good looking women".</p>
<p>Since I actually live in Norway, I guess I can answer some of these questions..</p>
<p>The Scandinavian languages are more alike than the Romance. It's really similar, I understood Swedish almost from the time I understood Norwegian. In addition, we get taught english in school from we're 8 till we're 19, and another foreign language(normally German, French or Spanish) from we're 13 till we're 19.</p>
<p>And I'd actually say that the Scandinavian countries in general has one of the highest percentage of good looking people in the world. Not necessarily because they're sooo much more beautiful, but because Scandinavians really takes good care of themselves..</p>
<p>And since you wondered what it was like; Noo, it's not actually snow/freezing all year long. If you avoid the far far northern parts(where very little people live), the thermostat will go below 0 (celcius) maybe 2-3 weeks in winter time, and that's basically it. In the summer it will range from 20 - 30 degrees..</p>