Well, if you ask a Dane and a Swede, you are sure to get two very different answers. My Danish friends say: “The Swedes are a bit stuck-up and boring” whereas the Swedes will simply shrug their shoulders and admit that “Danes and Swedes are different.

Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch. Other names for this group are the Nordic or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of the Old Norse language; Danish and Swedish are also classified as East Scandinavian or East Nordic languages.

Most Danes can understand written Swedish, though they’d often have to look up some “strange” terms (e.g. Swedish has a number of old loans from French that Danish hasn’t got) and may only understand some words from context (and occasionally misinterpret them..).

The Swedes simply speak Swedish. Swedish and Danish (and Norwegian) are mutually intelligible. You can compare them to Serbian and Croatian. The danes in the series speak danish and the swedes speak Swedish.

English might be one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, but don’t expect to hear Swedes speaking English to each other. Although more than 80 percent of people in Sweden do speak English, you might still come across people who don’t, so it’s best to learn some basic Swedish phrases for common niceties.

Yes it’s possible, but whether you’d want to is another story! While most swedes speak excellent English, Swedish is still their main language and learning the language makes socialising (and working) far easier.

As Sweden aims to internationalise its higher education sector and attract more foreign talent, one of its advantages is the country’s high English proficiency. For the fourth time in the past eight years, Sweden ranks number one on the 2018 EF English Proficiency Index .

For a single family generally 30–45,000 NOK per month (pretax) is considered as good salary. Remember the taxation in Norway is way too high, and the country is expensive too. A good salary (gross; namely before tax) would be around one million kroner per year.

Taxes, taxes, taxes Norway has one of the highest rates of personal income tax in the world, at some 39%. It has been even higher – at 47.5%, but is now dropping. Having said that, it’s lower than the highest rate in the UK.

High cost of living (negative) The high cost of living is one of the biggest downsides of living in Norway, especially for new arrivals. The price of groceries is much higher than virtually every other country. I think house prises and rental prices, in Oslo at least, will always appear on the extreme side.