First day of Swedish class
Monday was back to school day for me, the first back to school day in as long as I can remember. I got up early, made coffee, grabbed a half-filled notebook that I last used for an online screenwriting course, grabbed my bike and rode through the crisp fall morning to class. It felt amazing. I hardly noticed that it was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
The class, a four-week intensive Swedish course taught daily for three hours, was everything I had hoped for; and I came home the first day with pages of notes and the first real bit of faith that I might actually learn Swedish.
The class and the instructor came highly recommend to me by two different people, a Ukrainian and a Brazilian, that I met at Hillsong, an international English speaking church in Malmö. I decided I needed something to get me going again in my language learning, so I enrolled.
The class is intense. The teacher speaks mostly in Swedish. She says something, writes it on the white board, waits eagerly through the blank stares, gives us a few clues and then sometimes just says it in English. Sometimes she doesn’t have to translate at all, and that makes the class both challenging and interesting.
After living in Sweden for several months and grasping bits and pieces of the language, I’m discovering that the class is filling in the missing pieces, the little bits of information that I needed to bring it all together.
For one thing, I have found that written and spoken Swedish can seem almost unrelated as the Swedish speaker often excludes parts of written words and seems to blur others together in phrases that sound like one sing-song muddle. When I have pointed this out to Swedish speakers they often say, “Oh, but Danish is much worse.” (There should be a Swedish word for Danish blame shifting.)
My first attempt to learn Swedish began in Malibu when I bought Rosetta Stone for Swedish and sat in the kitchen with my open laptop. At that time moving to Sweden still felt like a hypothetical possibility and I needed something to motivate me to begin the work of preparing for the move.
Rosetta Stone was a great start and I learned my first bits of vocabulary, pojken (the boy), flickan (the girl), but Rosetta Stone is built on inductive reasoning, educated guessing, and the program only took me so far. I was totally confused by the grammar until July when I met a German hiker on our trek in Abisko, in the far north of Sweden, in the arctic circle. In a rustic hikers’ cabin with no electricity or running water, over a candlelight dinner of freeze-dried stew, she mentioned that German and Swedish are very similar and that learning Swedish had not been too difficult for her. The biggest difference was that the articles were at the end of the nouns instead of the beginning, for instance “katt” and “katten” in Swedish versus “die Katz” in German. When she said that it was like a light went on. I had been struggling for weeks and had no idea why the nouns changed without warning, and I suddenly understood. I wanted to immediately trek back to civilization, boot up my computer and get back into Rosetta Stone.
I also used Duolingo, which is a fun free app that I have on my phone. But just like Rosetta Stone, it is not enough. Sometimes you just need a human instructor who can said, “yes, that is right,” or “not exactly,” or even give physical tips like how to hold your mouth when you say the vowel sounds or the very odd sound that is the word for “seven.” It is written “sju,” and sounds a bit like a lazy, “ch” and “who?” I am sure that I don’t have it right yet. It is a good thing that I have three and a half more weeks.
Kip is having a work-from-home week, much to the delight of katten. Kip sent me this while I was at class today. Our Swedish cat says, “Det är mycket bra.” It is very good.