Live in Sweden and learn Swedish

In a sense, all names are two syllables (this is more or less a fact around the world) - one syllable names get lengthened, longer ones get shortened. John > Johnny, Elizabeth > Lizzie. (There are exceptions of course, such as Liz, Beth and so on.) This is done in a few different ways in Sweden depending on which generation you belong to, but a common “traditional” one is to shorten the first syllable and add an -e suffix to a male name: Tobias > Tobbe Karl > Kalle Jan > Janne Fredrik > Fredde Nicklas > Nicke Filip > Fille and so on Jonas > Jonne, but more commonly Jon t e, which also works for John, Johan and Johannes (actually three variations of the same name). There’s a variation to this theme where the phonetics don’t match up: Gustav > Gurra Bertil > Berra Female nicknames work somewhat similarly, mostly with an -i or -a ending instead: Susanne > Sussi Cecilia > Cissi Maria > Mia Karin > Kajsa (not quite sure how that works , actually)...

  uffixes such as   -ning ,   -ande   and   -else   are used to form many nouns from verbs in Swedish, but they’re not the only suffixes used so it’s best to learn the derived noun separately. But if you’re not sure, you can often guess at one of these. To show that it’s rather arbitrary, the noun in Swedish formed from  översätta  is  översättning , but in Danish it’s  oversettelse . The noun formed from  betyda  in Swedish is  betydelse  but in Danish it’s  betydning . If you go to  Svensk ordbok  (SO) which is available online, they often list the derived noun. So if you look up  betyda  then at the bottom you’ll see SUBST:  betydelse . "are" and "ning" are not like the endings that make plurals, because they change the meaning of the word they are attached to. "are" signifies the person who carries out the activity (if the stem is a verb) or "deals with" the concept (if the stem is a ...