20th of January Lesson

The lesson began with a guide to pronouncing the swedish alphabet:

Letter	Prounciation (utal)
A	ahh	B	behee
C	seea	D	dee
E	ehee	F	eff
G	gee	H	håå
I	eee	J	jiii
K	kåå	L	ell
M	emm	N	enn
O	oh	P	peh
Q	kuu	R	ärr
S	ess	T	teh
U	oooh	V	vee
X	eks	Y	ahh
Z	säta
å	oar	ä	air	ö	ooo

News Article

We discussed a news story which dealt with the growth of Malmö and the various areas (stadsdelar). I'll see if I can link to the original story, but it may take some finding. This led on to a discussion on why the city had grown so rapidly recently and who the largest identifiable group of immigrants to the area were and why. No surprises for guessing that it's the Danish, and they started to arrive after the bridge was built, recolonizing the land after they lost it in the 17th century to Sweden. The main reason for living in Sweden for the Danes is the relative strength of the Danish Kronor (approximately 1.5 times stronger), so they get more for their money. The housing is also quite a bit cheaper too.

The graph below taken from this site:

http://www.tendensoresund.org/en/migration-across-oresund





Time Questions:

1. Hur länge
2. Hur mycket
3. Hur mår du
4. Hur dags
5. Hur ofta
   
6. Hur lång
7. Hur långt
   

Vocabulary:

Word	English
Band	Tarif
ökar	more than
minska	to fall
tjanare pengar	to earn money

19th Jan Lesson

This lesson was a bit disrupted as we'd gained three or four new people and a couple of others from last week seemed to have disappeared inexplicably. We gained an Australian, a pole, an Italian and a Romanian and lost an American. This meant we reviewed the question topic we went over at the end of last week.

We began with a rehash of the questions and answer topic we reached at the end of last week. One of the first exercises was to find out who satisfied a characteristic or "Hitta en person som...":

Har en Eriksson mobiltelefon
kan tala fler än två språker
har storlek 39 i skor

We also learnt the correct use of vilken, vilket, vilka:

Vilken man tycker du om? use with en words
Vilket land kommer du från? use with et words
Vilka städer ligger i Iran use with plurals

Vocabularly

Ett tak - a ceiling
Syskon - brothers and sisters
Det är halt - it is slippery
Var försiktig - be careful
lever - to live
igar - past
öar - island
Rektorn - headmaster
i heljan - on the weekend

Days 3 & 4

I've got a bit out of synch here, so I'm trying to update the lessons on my day off from SFI (monday). It's just stopped snowing it started as I went to bed last night. I'm always pleased to see it, but it's messed up my plans to get regular runs going again, which have been disrupted after both the cold weather and christmas.

Day Three

It began with a discussion of how well people slept and, and we learnt the words:

		Hjarta - heart
		Hjärnan - Brain

We then went on to look at rules for pronounciation.

Pronouncing G

These rules below determine if a g is hard (god) or soft (sounds like a J :gifte)

This depends on the vowels:



Pronouncing K

The rules below determine if a k is hard (kommer) or soft (sh - kina):



Pronouncing sk

This is the so you can determine if it should be a hard sk e.g. skola or soft e.g. sked (spoon)



News related discussion

We talked about the earthquake in hati. Vocabularly learned:

Swedish	English
JordKalvet	Earthquake
ramlar	fall down
Hus rasar	House fell down
skakar	shake
skent	experience

Day Four

We started by talking about the types of clothes you wear dur

Image	Swedish	English
	lång kalsonger	long johns
	Vantar	mittens
	handskar	gloves
	en mössa	ski hat
	stövlar	high boots
	skor	shoes
	varma strumpor	warm socks
	boots / kängor	boots
	halsduk	scarf

Down to business

Today my SFI course began in earnest. It was a shock to the system getting up at 0615, but once I was up and had a cuppa it wasn't too bad. Temperatures had risen over night and the snow outside was turning distinctly slushy underfoot as I walked to catch the 46 into södervarn.

I arrived in our classroom about ten minutes early, there were four others present. We began by listing the sort of questions you'd ask someone you'd just met, or were making small talk with. As a group we came up with:

Vad heter du?
Varifrån kommer du?
Var bor du?
Har du barn?
Hur gammal är du?
Vad jobbar du med?
Vad gör du i fritid?
Är du gift?

We then broke into groups of two to ask each other questions. I suspect this activity's function was also to act as an ice breaker exercise and to give people the confidence to speak in class.

I was paired up with a Thai girl called Nongnutch, who'd lived in Sweden for some years. Following my haltering interrogation I established that during her time in Sweden she and had worked in both hotels and restaurants, that she has a young daughter and enjoys chatting to friends on the Internet and hanging out on facebook. When it was her turn to question me I quickly realised her spoken Swedish is much more advanced than mine. Interestingly she didn't know the word ganska which means very much or pretty much and my use of it in a sentence threw her a bit and I felt quite encouraged.

As the morning passed I realised that I was keeping up with the class and could understand what our teacher was saying (she speaks entirely in Swedish, even when explaining things) and at present my spoken Swedish is the weak part and I must practice as much as possible.

We then went around the room and told the class about the other person. Once we'd drawn up a list of people and nations and mother tongues, our teacher Margareta found each one on an old world map (in fact so old the soviet union dominated Asia).

Our course has students from:

• Thailand
• Iran
• India
• Ghana
• Italy
• Columbia
• Brasil
• The Philipines
• USA
• China
  

We then discussed a story from the cover of the sydsvenskan which discussed how various university courses were being dominated by women. This also led to a discussion of gender roles in Sweden, although carried out in simple language, I'm still amazed I was able to fully follow our teacher's points.

The final topic we covered was the grammar of questions. Firstly we looked at sentences which contained question words and the correct order:

Question word => Verb

till exemple: När öpnar bank?

We then looked at simple questions which had the order:

Verb => Subject

Läsar Karin en book i körket?

and learnt an answer was called en påstående

Additonal Vocabularly during picked up during class

1. Ursäkta jag kommer lite sent - Sorry I'm a little late
   
2. Nästestörsta - next biggest
3. Obligatorisk - Mandatory
4. Frivilling - voluntary
5. jämställdhet - equality
   

Begin the beginning

I've been meaning to record my adventures and occasional struggles for posterity and the entertainment of anyone who knows me or who might be interested in the practicalities of moving to another country and culture. I thought starting my SFI (Svensk för Invandre) ,or Swedish For Immigrants, as it's known in English would be a decent enough place to start. So this blog is really about my journey to absorb Swedish culture and feel at home here. As time goes by I hope I can even start to write some of this in Swedish.

Today marked the start of my full time SFI course, and I rose early to make sure I got to the Komvux education centre punctually. It was snowing moderately as I left to catch the bus into town. I was a little nervous about what to expect, I'd been put in the '3C' stream which meant I have some language skill already and suspected I'd be in over my head.

I'd been graded in this fashion after attending a test at the same centre back in early December. The test was a sheet of A4 paper that had about twenty words on it. The object of the test was to write a sentence in Swedish with each word. This combined with a short conversation with one of the Examiners would, apparently, determine at what point I would enter the SFI education. From what I later learned the streaming is determined by your level of education and if you speak a language that uses a western alphabet. After the test I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the words I not only knew, but could construct reasonable sentances with. It did however make me realize that my comprehension of Swedish is much better than my spoken and my active vocabulary.

After arriving at Komvux I walked with a guy, who turned out to be English (I'd heard him talking to the receptionist), over to the building where I'd been told to go in the acceptance letter. I talked to James, who was from London too and had moved with his Swedish partner. He seemed a nice guy, and it was with some regret I realized I was in the wrong room. The classroom I sat down in was for people with no Swedish language skills at all. I wished him good luck and found class room three at the end of the corridor.

I was greeted by a silver haired lady with a pugish nose, who introduced herself as Margareta Lindberg. I introduced myself with: "Hej, jag heter Adrian", and she scanned her class list to find me. I was also asked what my mother tongue was. As other students arrived I noted the class had a cosmopolitan mix of Polish, Thai, Tagalog, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Urdu as first languages.

Margareta then proceeded to outline the details of the course, we'd be attending four days a week: Tuesday through to Friday and from 0815 to 1215 each day. We also filled in a form so we could join the komvux library and were also made aware of what to do if we were sick and couldn't attend. I was surprised that I understood about 80% of what she actually said and only really needed to get the rest from the context. She then went on to mention how we could study and practise our language skills outside of the class hours. After this short session, just after 10:15 we were dismissed, as the course starts properly tomorrow at 0815. I spoke briefly to an Italian chap called Christiano who was introducing himself to everyone in the room in swedish. We had a very broken brief conversation about London:

C: Hej, Christano
A: Hej, Adrian
C: Jag kommer fran Italien
A: Jag Kommer fran London i Engleska (sic, I got mixed up here, what I should have said was: Jag Kommer fran England of course...)
C: London är and väkert stad
A: Ja, men London är and stor stad...(then I went on in English about it being bigger than Malmö)
A: Hej då. vi ses imorgon.

As I rode the bus home I felt good, and very positive, I wasn't just an unemployed ghost anymore, I had a purpose, I was a full time student again.