Making bricks without straw

After three full weeks on the SFI Språkverket programme, I thought it was time to reflect on my initial experiences and opinions as well as summarize how it works. I thought initially I'd describe how the programme is designed.

The programme is largely a lecture based syllabus that contains students studying for both the C and D exams. Each student is allocated to a base group teacher who is responsible for making sure you have a plan for your studies and who meets with you every month to review your progress. When you arrive on a Monday morning the first thing you have to do is to plan your week's study, Typically one chooses from:

• Grammar lectures
• Comprehension exercises
• Listening exercises
• Speaking activities
• Conversation Practice with a Swedish Senior
• Lectures about famous Swedish cultural figures / aspects of Swedish life
• Self Study
  

In addition to the title, the activities also state which level they belong to, either C or D. The lectures also fit into a theme. Themes normally last for around a month and enable the teaching staff to review a trench of your work and give them to the opportunity to evaluate your progress. Our current theme is literature.

Every Monday morning my base group teacher painfully reiterates that we should all carefully and rationally review our progress and use our judgement to pick activities that will develop our weaknesses rather than just picking lectures and activities that sound interesting or that we're good at.

Herein lies, in my opinion, the fundamental ideological problem of the course. This supposition assumes that you can make an informed, astute judgement about your needs when you are little more than a novice. How can you make those choices when you don't know what you don't know?

It's also seems a classic modern teaching approach, probably with the intention of “empowering the student” or some such pseudo bizspeak nonsense. In theory, yes it could work, but it's spoilt by most people's tendency towards laziness. The other problem is that you can't make informed choices about what to study based on your strengths and weaknesses if you don't know the totality of the syllabus. How am I able to make sure if choose one lecture or activity over another that it won't hinder me in the future? What grammatical principals should I know, and at what point in the syllabus will knowing those principals really be useful? Surely these are only questions that a trained professional with an overview of the entire subject will have?

I was told that we'd meet with our base group teacher and set out a plan of what I need to study and this simple plan would inform the direction of my studies. So far there hasn't been the slightest threat of this occurring, so therefore I've decided that it's up to me to try and make sense of the syllabus and arrange to talk to the teaching staff next week.

Volcano!

I stepped out the house this morning and smelt the distinct odor of bad eggs on the wind. It was, no doubt, caused by sulphur from the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, over in Iceland.

The eruption has caused plenty of chaos over here. Swedish airspace was closed at 1800 last night. The latest news suggests that the earliest that southern Sweden's (including the country's largest airport, Arlanda near Stockholm) airspace would be open is tomorrow. Airports to the north of Gävle, i.e. Norrlands are open for emergency traffic only. I take this to mean air ambulances etc. It apparently all depends on the wind direction and if a new eruption occurs. According to our local press, it should reach us tonight, with ash particles in the air, the authorities are advising people who have respiratory problems (well known for being out and about of Friday nights...) to stay indoors.

Every Friday morning in class we're expected to have read and produced a short summary on a news article that interested us. This morning I chose this article. I was surprised how easily I understood it and didn't have to look any words up. I think I summarized the article poorly (it was only the second time I've done this exercise), as once we'd discussed each other's stories, we worked together on how to create an easy and comprehensible example. The key point was to try to explain the key points of the story with words suitable to your vocabulary.

Reading a newspaper is a great way of developing your vocabulary. I normally read the local free commuter paper on my bus journey home but it doesn't have the greatest range of stories and seems to concentrate on local crime stories. It's a useful exercise, but after a while you get a bit bored of stories about assault or speeding. Occasionally Malmö gets a shooting, there's a lot of organised crime in the city apparently. I find this a bit bizzare, as size wise it's just a bit larger than the town where my mother lives near, Swindon. Despite it's celebrated status as one of Britain's crapest towns, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have many gangland slayings or bombings (Malmö has had a spate of bombs targetting nightclubs and restaurants recently). I may have to make some sort of comparitive study at some stage to satisfy my curiosity.

Once I've read a story, I underline any words I don't understand and look them up on the dictionary on my iphone. When I get home I add them to my weekly vocabulary flashcards.

In local Bunkeflostrand news, it seems our neighbourhood nazi is still being hounded by his anti-fascist detractors. Once again they've spray-painted his house near our local supermarket with graffiti accusing the occupants of being racists / nazis. Previously the message was fairly comical, and read: "Welcome home nazi swines". What amused me was imagining the anti-fascists as slightly conflicted once they'd finished the message, realizing they'd expressed a warm sentiment which could be misinterpreted as having genuinely missed him or her whilst they'd been away on vacation. This time the anti-fascists have opted for a safer and less confused message in which they name and shame the resident. Disappointingly, the person's name didn't throw up any hits on google.

Interview washup / post mortum

I was invited to interview at a consultancy company in nearby Lund before I went away for my brother's wedding, as I'd begun to suspect, they informed me they can't offer me a position at the moment.

Yesterday I rang my interviewer to find out if they were still interested, or if they weren't, to see if they would offer me some feedback. During the telephone call my interviewer told me three or four times how interesting my CV was and how they wanted to keep my details in case an appropriate project came up. Now this may be just letting me down gently, but I think the interviewer was being candid.

I have decided to be upbeat about both the interview and the experience and avoid my usual cynical and negative outlook and have taken the following positives:

1. I managed to conduct a proportion of the interview in Swedish, I understood everything my interviewer asked and only really had to switch to English when I answered questions about the technical nature of software development projects I'd worked on over the last few years.

2. I think I've found a target market for my services: large IT consultancies. I seem to have a nice mix of skills (coding, requirements gathering, systems analysis, team management, project management) and just the sort of service they like to pimp out to companies who don't have those readily available to them.

3. It was my first interview in Sweden so I had no idea what to expect. It was very informal and much more along the lines of an informal chat about my career history and I guess to see if my personality would fit in with the people they have working there already.

I described the situation to a friend at my SFI course today, and she put it into perspective for me. She simply said how sometimes certain things are meant to be, and others aren't. Maybe it wasn't the right opportunity for me and a better one would come along soon. I've decided my friend's positive outlook is the best approach.

On the language front, I really felt on top of things today, lots of flowing Swedish and good conversations, and the synapse were firing today. I also got lots of compliments on the progress I've made so far which I really appreciated and built me up a bit.

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.

Språkverket / Vegas here we come

Last Friday we had a part wake, part celebration on our SFI course. During our normal break at 0930 tea, coffee and cakes, key ingredients for a good fika, were consumed. Many, many pictures were also taken. We also presented our teacher, who has made a major difference to our language skills in the short time she's taught us, with a number of gifts. During my time here so far, I have often reflected on how people working in education and medicine have such worthwhile and meaningful jobs and the difference they make to other people's lives. It also makes me think about how irrelevant and unfulfilling my chosen occupation can be. Perhaps I'll rant about that another day though.

The Rektor decided that due to the sheer number of people waiting for a place on a course at Komvux Södervarn he had to reassign our teacher. For us it meant that we'd be placed into the Spåkverket system.

This system comprises of three classes, somewhat like a home room, where you have a teacher who monitors your learning and is your guide. Each Monday you pick the lessons you want to attend for the week. The idea is you take responsibility for your own study, and with your teacher's advice construct a syllabus to take you onwards to the next exam.

The student population is mixed, some are studying for the C course, others the D. This week has been a bit of a false start, as I've only been able to attend one day (I had an interview on Tuesday), Wednesday is our day off, and today our home group teacher is off on holiday. Luckily next week the newly transferred students are on holiday too, as the existing students will individually meet with their home room teacher and discuss their progress. This is very convenient for me as we're off to Las Vegas for nine days tomorrow evening (via London first), for my Brother's wedding.

It should be an interesting trip, both my girlfriend and I are curious to see quite how tacky it really is. We're staying at the golden nugget hotel:

I'm particularly intrigued by the swimming pool which has a shark tank and a water slide tube that passes through the middle of it. Needless to say I've packed my trunks, and hope the weather is warm enough (it is March there after all, estimates are around 20c) or the pool is heated at this time of year.

We're staying overnight in London at my apartment both on the way out and on the homeward leg, mainly because I couldn't find an american airline which wasn't either ridiculously expensive or involved many changes. It'll also give me the opportunity to pick up my post from my apartment in London and catch up with a few friends too.

Onwards to D

So the results are in and it seems the C course exam went pretty well for me, and I scored a VG mark overall. According to the breakdown of scoring I only dropped two marks on the first three papers. My submission on written section was also apparently good, despite my fears after the exam.

So now it's on to the D course, although we're still not sure if that will involve breaking up our current class or continuing with the same teacher. I'll learn my fate tomorrow when class resumes as our teacher met with the head of department on Friday to discuss exactly how they're going to restructure things.

C Course exam, D course shake up?

On friday morning I sat my SFI C course exam. It took three hours and was divided up into four parts:

• A reading paper
• A listening paper
• Another reading paper
• A written paper

The first reading paper was pretty straight forward, an article about a girl who did her pratik (swedish work experience) at a shop where she could practice her Swedish. The questions were pretty straight forward, and were multiple choice. Other questions involved reading a letter to an employer and reading menus for restaurants and answering questions based on them. It was a pretty gentle start to the exam.

I wasn't really looking forward to the listening paper as the sound on most of the recordings we'd heard in class was dire, and it made distinguishing words tricky. Luckily most of the questions weren't too hard, and each section was played twice. The second recording, was a telephone message recording for council services sounded like it had been recorded on low quality tape back in the 1950s by someone who'd had a serious head injury, but the answers seemed obvious.

The third paper, another rcomprehension exercise, and had questions about charts, a train time table and a section about a camping site and didn't present any problems.

I wasn't really happy with the written paper, which asked us to choose between one of employers and to write a short letter to them asking them if they would offer you a pratik. The choices were:

• A supermarket
• A kindergarten
• An Auto repair shop
• A restaurant

I chose the supermarket, as years ago as a teenager I'd worked in waitrose, a british supermarket. I took my time and planned out the sections of the letter:

1. Opening
2. About me
3. Why I'm interested
4. Why I would be suitable
5. Salutations

I then began to flesh out the paragraphs on some scrap paper. I got through planning the first sections but really began to struggle for why I'd be interested. Perhaps it's pride or a lack of imagination, but I really couldn't suggest any reason I'd want to go on a this imagined placement.

In the end the predicitable happened, I realised I'd spent way too much time planning and had to rush writing the letter and wasn't really satisfied with what I submitted. The letter seemed very basic, and I didn't feel I gave myself a chance to either use my vocabularly or show I understood how to use the past / future tense.

Discussing it later with my better half (a swedish native) we concluded that perhaps I was setting my standards too high, and that all the exam would really expect is that you could string a reasonably coherent sentence together and understand the past and present tense. Given that all academic backgrounds and abilities have to pass the exam, perhaps the demands I set myself were a bit too high. I noticed that the exam also featured the usual thinly disguised propaganda for the 'Swedish Way of doing things', and possibly the numerous references to work experience are actually subtly implanting the suggestion into your brain.

On reflection, It's a milestone. At the end of March I will have been living in Sweden for six months, I think, I've progressed steadily. Of my class mates who have a similar level of spoken language, all of them have lived in Sweden for at least two years, and in some cases over five.

On wednesday the teachers of all of the c course classes (morning, afternoon, evening) will meet with the department head (Rektor) to discuss how and who will teach the D course. Our teacher explained that there is a possibility that our class will be broken up and we'll move onto a new course, possibly losing classmates. Personally I hope we get to stay with our current teacher and that our course teaches both C and D simulatenously. This apparently does happen frequently according ot the wife of my american class mate, who is currently studying on course pitched at that level. As I mentioned before we've been very lucky so far as we have a really excellent teacher, and I'd like to continue to study with her.



I'm excited to report that Håkan, the lovable everyman bartender featured in swedish docu-soap 'Färjan' has been given his own new spin off series. It's a fair reward for a man who's unique blend obvious charm, bartending philosophies, and occasional quizzical facial expressions carry the show.

The programme is called, somewhat unimaginatively, 'Håkan's Bar'. The curious can see the trailer.
From what I gather our hero has taken a break from the ferry and headed for the Swedish shangri-la,Thailand.