Ten days off and a fried active vocabulary

I'm back from my brother's wedding in Las Vegas, and although I had a great time, my Swedish feels rusty. My comprehension is still working, but my active vocabulary feels like the linguistic equivalent of lungs gasping for air after the first run after a long lay off.

I headed in today for my second språkverket day. I chose all D course lessons today, one comprehension, the other a listening exercise. I found the comprehension to be fairly easy, it was an article about a belly dancing journalist, so my word of the day is magdansös (belly dancer). The hearing exercise was harder, partly as it seems all of the material used for these exercises seems to have been recorded on really poor quality microphones, so you have lots of background noise. I followed most of it, but missed a few subtleties. The second listening exercise was worse, it was the classic "announcements in a train station". Train stations are noisy, echo prone places, combine that with dodgy recording equipment, you're really up against it. Every language I've studied so far I've ended up straining to hear what time a train departs against an aural soup of echoes, foot steps, and garbled announcements.

We've also been given an assignment which involves reading a book and then discussing it with others who've read it too, a lätt bokpratargrupp apparently. I chose 'Dracula', mainly because I've read the original and was curious how they'd shorten the story as a easy reading book, and partly because the other titles sounded pretty dire. I've just about recovered from reading three really terrible easy reading books on the C course which were written by teachers at my school. I think it's safe to say the booker prize won't be heading to komvux Södervarn.

I was also struggling for motivation today, I had an interview before I went away, and I hoped that they'd let me know just after I arrived back from vacation. I'm going to interpret the lack of communication as an omen of impending disappointment. Frankly, I'd really like to have the peace of mind of a regular pay check. The six months off has been nice and I've enjoyed learning Swedish so far, but there's nothing like work to help you assimilate properly.