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