OK, I’ve made a start – I’ve been to my first Swedish class. It was run by a very camp Croat – Casper – who learnt Swedish from peacekeeping troops in the Balkans before moving to Sweden to study… Oh, and the courses are at Westminster University – they seem completely incapable of administering anything as no-one attending the course had a clue what was going on, and Casper was astounded that 37 people turned up.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. Most of the attendees are in the 25-40 age range, about half have Swedish partners and that’s their reason for learning, and more than a third are not English native speakers, and I spent some time chatting to a girl from Kina who spoke kinesiska. I was admonished – fy skäms (shame on you!) – by Casper when I said jag är frÃ¥n Wales men jag talar inte walesiska. My response was Jag talar fyra sprÃ¥k! Anyway, more next week.
Hej Jon,
The SkÃ¥ne accent is the best 🙂 Good for you for taking Swedish lessons. Make sure that Helena pratar svenska med dig ofta. That is the mistake I make with my Welsh boyfriend – I do not speak Swedish with him often enough. He also takes Swedish lessons, but we do not practise enough at home. My fault … Lycka till med svenskan!
Tack! Jag talar lite Svenska i huset… And I have also managed to get promoted to the 2nd level of Swedish at Westminster after 2 weeks. 🙂
It’s good fun, and I’m learning quite fast, so let’s see how far it goes.
With knowledge of English and German, you will manage to learn Swedish rather quickly. When I studied in Lund for a year, I just took the complimentary Erasmus course in the beginning and one more course at the Folkshögskolan and I was fluent after 5,6 month. Now with the internet it is so easy to read swedish newspapers, to buy swedish books, and it is a nice language, especially the Skanska version spoken in the south.
A pitty I hardly use it and so forget it more and more…
Lycka till!
I’m not sure that the Swede I live with would agree with you about the Skane accent! 🙂
It is a language that is easy enough to learn, but my problem is that I am always quite lazy about language learning. I hate sitting down and learning pages of vocab and rules. We’ll see how it goes!
Jon! Yes, love or partnerships have always a big influence in language courses attendance… After 2 years with Marko, I have started to consider seriously taking Slovenian courses, and I have even checked for some specific places but is soooo expensive… even in the Slovenian House in Brussels they wanted to charge me 400 EUr for a 60 hours course! they have to be mad… but again I think is the partnership factor, since they might understand that everyone willing to study Slovenian has to do it for love… and love doesn’t have a price, right? 🙂
dovro, dovro Jon!