May I share my findings, being fluent in EN/NL/DE/FR and learning Swedish. I found many similarities, but they are situated o different aspects of the language.
Grammar
We can hardly claim that Swedish grammar is like English grammar, far from that.
One can't say that Swedish is like French, no, far from that.
Vocabulary
Swedes have adopted many French words, and of course many English words too, especially those with regard to technology.
In both cases, words from French or English origin, Swedes have adopted the word as a sound, but have chosen to write them as if it were Swedisg phonetic notation. Look at these examples
- sajt => EN:"a (web) site"
- fåtölj => FR:"an (arm) chair"
- fason pl fasoner => FR façon(s) = manière(s) / EN manner(s)
Swedish words make me often go "back in time" to Diutch words that have been forgotten. Some people will call these words "outdated" or "obsolete", but often they are quite to the point of expressing a certain "nuance". One should not forget that English has a vocabulary of 600.000 words (including those of Shakespeare and older writers and poet) and that French and Dutch have 350.000 words.
So where are all those words gone in Dutch, or in English, if it s known that you can be considered fluent if you practice an English vocabulary of say 5000 to 7000 "Oxford basic" words, and be able to say anything that you want.
So for Dutch also, people nowadays use a very poor subset of words (and too often just English loanwords) and the fact that I learn Swedish makes all these words come back in my Dutch memory.
To be continued in "Swedish compared to Dutch/German". viewtopic.php?p=5367#p5367