Tongue tied tuesdays

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon related to my learning of Swedish recently, namely I speak noticeably better Swedish after the first day of the school week than on day one.

Now this may be obvious to the point of being banal, but on Saturday, Sunday and Monday I don't get much chance to practice my language skills. Although my partner is Swedish, and we've established I've reached the point where I can actually hold my end of a conversation up, often she's too tired from working or we forget. This results in us largely speaking in English.

Although I watch some Swedish television, the majority of what's broadcast on television is mostly U.S. imports or the slurry of British crime series.

I do watch some Swedish shows, and a particular favourite of mine is Färjan, which is a docu-soap about Viking Lines' 'Cinderella' cruise ship and its staff and passengers.

I have a guilty pleasure for docu-soaps, but the real attraction for me in watching 'Färjan' is Swedes behaving badly on what is essentially a booze cruise to Finland and back. For a foreigner it offers up a vision of how ordinary swedes behave, and misbehave particularly when the stimuli of alcohol is added.

If you watch it look out for smooth barman Håkan, singing ship's steward and entertainment officer Per Nyberg (complete with, I'm told, impenetrable småland accent and who bears a distinct likeness to Welsh comedian Rob Brydan pictured below on the right)











The cast is rounded off with the detestable little hitler with handcuffs, security officer Anita, who is frequently filmed meting out her own brand of particularly heavy handed justice to inebriated Swedes. One can only hope she isn't as dour off camera, and the show is cut in such a way to depict her as an archetype.

In order to remedy the Tuesday morning linguistic equivalents of cold starts, I'm thinking of attending the language cafe in central malmö. This offers the opportunity to practice Swedish with volunteers. As a concept, I think it sounds great, and shows the effort that the majority of Swedes are making to help us immigrants fit in and improve our language skills.

I hope this will provide me with a mental work out which will leave me ready for the school week. I'll try and find a link, and report back when I've had my first experience.

There is no bad weather...

All good things come to an end, and the coldest winter in skåne for some years looks like it's on the wane tonight.

As a transplanted englishman well acquainted with rain and bone seeping dampness, the sub zero temperatures for the last two and a half months, have been a new and exciting pleasure. The other half, being of norlandic extraction has, of course, scoffed many times at the the locals and my child like pleasure at seeing it snow. Still, seeing the rain fall tonight and the snow turn distinctly slushy in town I can't help but feel a little sad.

It's amused and baffled me in equal measures to hear the locals whine about the snow. Malmö may be many things but it's unlikely to win any beauty contests. Like london, a dusting of snow really makes the place look pretty. That coupled with the lack of sunshine from october until december makes me yearn for the envitable move 'up north' to Hälsingland.

Still the SMHI is forecasting a category two storm saturday night (what ever that means), but the ten day MSN forecast, which I've become slightly fixated with, shows temperatures rising above zero next week.

On the plus note I laughed heartily at the local version of sweden's free commuter rag, also named 'metro'. In the sport section they have a metric evaluating Malmö's favourite son, Zlatan. Today's median Zlatlanometer is 2.5. What scale this equates to, and what empirical evidence was used to arrive at this judgement is totally beyond me.

Trevlig Helgan to anyone with nothing better to do than to read this,

A.

conversations with a swedish senior

As part of our SFI C course, every Thursday we have a ninety minute conversation exercise with a volunteer. For our class our volunteers are three retired Swedish gentlemen. Every week we break off into groups of between five and seven people to practice our spoken Swedish on a native who isn't our course teacher.

On the face of it, this is a great idea and a huge opportunity to learn and hone our spoken language skills. Unfortunately for us, the reality has been somewhat different for six of my classmates and I. The root cause is, regrettably, our volunteer, let's call him Mr.K. Mr.K is a likeable chap, who's lived an interesting life: he's visited many countries, changed careers a couple of times, has a variety of interests and is still active in local politics. The trouble is, well,Mr.K really, really likes talking about himself, to the extend that you have to fight to get a word into the monologues.

During the first week, after he'd asked us to present ourselves (the sfi conversational gambit of disclosing your nation of origin, how long you've lived in Sweden, what work you do or did in your homeland) and once we'd been around the table he began to talk. Whether it was nerves or another reason, he seldom allowed anyone else to get a word in edgeways.

I checked with my classmates, had they found it as one sided as I had? Everyone agreed, we'd been treated to a monologue: Mr.K, great man of Malmö, artist, politician, businessman. Hoping this may be just the first week and things would be different next week, we suggested we select a theme for the second session, an easy subject that everyone could talk about. I proposed we chat about holidays and countries we have visited. Everyone's been on holiday, and I thought it was a suitable subject for a group with a basic language vocabulary.

On the day, I started. I mentioned that the previous summer we had travelled to gotland, an island of the west coast of gotland in the baltic sea. As soon as those words left my mouth Mr.K lept into the conversation. Had I stayed in Visby he asked? No, I replied, we stayed on a farm in a small village called Roma. I expected a follow up conversation asking me what places or sights I had visited whilst there (gotland is a popular Swedish tourist location, all sandy beaches and historic medieval main town), and a chance to talk about what I liked. Nope, that was enough for Mr.K, he moved on the next person, and in about ten minutes felt he had exhausted the topic of conversation. Each person was asked the bare minimum, where they had been, if Mr.K had been there, it was a chance for him to talk about himself, otherwise he moved on.

A pattern began to emerge, we quickly noted. Mr.K didn't like to listen much, and doesn't seem to understand the dynamics of a conversation: namely one party talks, the other listens and then asks questions or perhaps comments on what the first party has related. He also seemed to largely ignore the linguistic ability of the group, and when talking about himself would launch into complicated explanations of what his business does or his political interests. I think I understood some of what he was talking about through guess work and the context, but others clearly didn't. We, as a group, were also too polite, we didn't tell him we didn't understand (often you couldn't get a word in edgeways anyway) and suffered in silence.

After the second session I was pretty frustrated as we headed back to class, what was the point? We our teacher asked us how the sessions went this week, I spoke up for our group and let rip. I mentioned Mr.K didn't listen, skirted around our chosen subject, seemed to ignore various group members and at one point suggested a theme (for the ladies apparently) of giving them 500 kr to buy some pretty clothes (I winced when he asked them). It was, I asserted, not satisfactory. Our teacher promised to speak to Mr.K and help him understand the necessity of allowing us to speak and to give the entire group the opportunity to practise.

As the day of the third session arrived I promised myself it would hopefully be better, surely our teacher has spoken to Mr.K and explained what we wanted to get out of the session? My hopes were cruelly dashed, Mr.K explained he wanted us to talk about politics in Malmö during the session. I was amazed at the lack of awareness, how could people working on the SFI C course possibly have the vocabulary to talk about politics? Coupled with the fact that politics is a very personal matter anyway, I thought it was fairly inappropriate. Mr.K pressed on nonetheless, and asked the first person. Luckily for Mr.K he asked one of our more able group members, who had lived in sweden for three years. She was able to state that she didn't really follow politics and wasn't really aware of what the local issues were she could at least name the major parties. The second person, to her credit simply stated she wasn't interested in politics, but this didn't deter Mr.K.

By the time he reached me I was getting annoyed. I spoke my mind, or as best I could in Swedish. I told him I didn't have either the knowledge or vocabulary to effectively contribute and that I felt it was too complicated a subject for our group and that I felt it would be more appropriate for us to talk about a different subject. Mr.K reacted by telling me that I spoke good Swedish, and we should persevere, when I disagreed and reiterated my point, he asked what subject we should switch too. before waiting for an answer, he pressed on. During this exchange I didn't bother to hide my irritation and anger. This seemed to do the trick and he stared asking us if we wanted to ask him questions, and finally we were being offered the chance to set our own topics.

This finally seemed to work and we actually got to talk about suitable subjects, we discussed:

• the war between Sweden and Russian in 1802 (Sweden's last major war) as it had been mentioned in conjuction with the two Swedish soliders killed in Afghanistan last week.
• Migration to Malmö
• Simple world events

By the time we'd finished I felt we'd finally had a good session, which was confirmed as the majority of my group took fika in the canteen.

This post probably seems very negative, and yes, in parts it is, but I do appreciate Mr.K is a volunteer, giving his time freely to help new arrivals learn a new language. I also appreciate that he isn't a trained professional, but what he's doing is incredibly worthwhile and I am grateful for the opportunity. Perhaps this is the first time he's taken part in this programme, and I am aware that it is important for us to have things we want to discuss with him too as well as the importance of listening rather than trying to shout others down.

Geek aids for learning

I've been playing around with a couple on nice applications to help me learn my vocabulary. One is a flashcards website and an iphone app called mental case, the other is an application which you normally use to create podcasts called audacity.

I've been using the flashcards to learn vocabulary on the bus. I've been creating them using flashcardexchange

It's a nice free site which allows you to choose if you want to make your cards public or keep them private. Once you've created your cardset (what they call a group of questions) you can create tags which will help categorise the cards.

You can also pay a small fee (about $20 USD) for extra features (exporting / importing), but so far a free account has given me everything I need.

On the whole the site is very good, my only gripe is that the help and documentation could do with some work. The support is excellent though, I raised a query as I was having trouble finding my flashcards using mental case on my iphone and the developer and site owner emailed me a few hours later with a set of instructions.

Here's one of my flashcard sets with vocab from my second week:

I've also been using audacity a podcasting software to create mp3 files I listen to whilst waiting for the bus. It's very user friendly, all you really have to do is record and edit. It's very well documented so within about 30 mins I could edit what I'd recorded and even add music so each file had a little opening jingle which I shamelessly lifted from an arcade fire track. The content itself wasn't tricky, it's just me saying English words, leaving a pause and then saying the Swedish word, a kind of vocab call and response. It's an easy way to take it in and I feel it's working well.

Audacity

Here's a couple of how to's I found helpful on youtube:

General Introduction
Removing Vocals from a mp3

SFI snakes and ladders

I've got a bit behind with updating the blog last week, I'll try and get up to date this week.

I suppose the biggest bit of news is my abortive move up to the intensive class which took place today. Abortive because it became clear to me after about ten minutes in the new class that I was in the wrong place.

First impressions count a lot in life and for me they were all terrible. The teacher was all over the place, she didn't have control over the class, there were two or three other conversations going on in the room, and two or three pupils who seemed to like the sound of their own voices a little too much and were a bit disruptive.

It didn't help that there were too few seats in the room either.

I felt immediately out of place and totally adrift. I realized almost immediately that the class wasn't going to work for me. This was then followed with a grammar exercise that was explained very briefly and frankly by that stage I'd already pulled down the mental shutters. We moved to another larger room, but by that stage I was just waiting for the class to finish so I could talk to the other teacher to tell her I didn't want to be on the intensive course and would rejoin the C course. She tried to convince me to sit in for the lesson, but I told her firmly but politely that it was important that I looked out for my education and that I feel comfortable and that I didn't in the intensive course.

I'd realised that I got lucky with my C course teacher, who is excellent, and even if the course is a bit slower and it takes me a bit longer to clear the D exam, I think it'll be worth it in the long run.