How similar are Swedish and Russian? I know Swedish is Germanic and Russian is Slavic, and both are Indo-European.
I have been learning a bit of Russian recently and I have noticed a few similarities, e.g. I speak in Russian - Jag talar på ryska - Я говорю по-русски. (Ya govoryu po-russki.). Everything expect the verb is quite similar. Another one is onion - lök - лук (luk). I am a beginner and just wondering.
The very foundation of their respective grammars is the same, but since you really have to go back to Proto Indo European to find the most recent common ancestor, it may be quite hard to see.
For one thing both have genders, although Standard Swedish merged its masculine and feminine genders into common gender a century or so ago and thus now has two (common and neuter), while Russian still has three (masuline, feminine and neuter). Genuine dialects of Swedish often retain a three gender system though.
Both Swedish and Russian have cases as well, and both systems are nominative-accusative rather than absolutive-ergative, but while Russian's is a complex one with six cases, the Swedish one has become very simplified over the centuries; from Old Swedish's four to Modern Standard Swedish's 1.5. That is, you've got a subject form and an object form for most personal pronouns, and they say genitive still exists for nouns and pronouns alike, but the reality is that nouns have an enclitic particle (-s) that you tuck onto the end of an entire noun phrase rather than a special form of the noun itself, and personal pronouns have possessive forms that depend on the gender of the thing possessed rather than a true genitive.
Both have gender agreement, that is adjectives change depending on the gender of the noun it describes, and Russian has case agreement as well, which Swedish also used to have but due to not having much of a case system any more doesn't.
Russian also retains different verb forms for different persons, while Swedish has got rid of that too, but you can still see remnants of it sometimes, especially in traditional songs, and since it was pretty standard up until 1920 or so, you don't have to go back too far to see it in regular texts either, although by then the divide was simply singular vs plural.
Then there are of course quite a few words in both languages that got borrowed either from one to the other or from the same third source, and a few others that look similar due to sheer coincidence, this på and по being one of such cases since the Swedish preposition was á in Old Swedish, and would have been å in Modern Swedish if it weren't for the expression upp å ("up on"), which got reinterpreted as upp på a long time ago.
Other than that and maybe a few more non-obvious things that I've forgotten about, they are not very similar at all.
