Weird Offal

Every country has peculiar elements of cusine. The other day whilst carrying out my usual post workout shop I discovered two cracking examples of bizarre meat products:
The first was grisknorr:



Although they look quite phallic, they are (I'm assured by the gf) in fact pigs tails. Note the very reasonable price, approximately 95p for anyone from the UK. Once I'd got over my initial revulsion I tried to inconspiciously snap a picture. I then continued to browse the meat section desperately trying to think of a suitably bland meal that would satisfy my pregnant girlfriend who is still suffering from morning sickness.

As I journeyed past the border of the pork cuts, I happened across this wonderfully named beef product:

Elefantöra or elephant ears seems to be some sort of large beef steak cut, and I trust not anything to do with actual ears. Needless to say neither appealed.



I also found this exciting retail opportunity, a wonderfully kitsch box of chocolates, decorated with a picture of Sweden's princess victoria and her fiance Daniel, who are due to be married next month.

Over half the cost of their lavish wedding (estimated at 2.6 million dollars) will be paid for by the Swedish tax payer. The king has nobley stepped in and picked up the other half.

I find it amusing that although Sweden is very keen to portray itself as an extremely modern nation state where equality is vital principal, the presence of a monarch seems somewhat of an anacronism. Princess Victoria's fiance is apparently an ex-personal trainer, perhaps that's the advertisement for the open society. Still he's married well hasn't he?

On the study front, as you can tell from this rambling post, we had most of last week off. This was because of a combination of public holidays and one of our teachers taking a few days off to entertain her mother. We've also reached the end of our current theme (the world of books), and we had to submit our folder containing everything we'd worked on for the past five weeks. This week is also shorter than usual because we each have a meeting with our homegroup teacher to review our progress, identify our weaknesses and to set some targets for the next study theme. I'm pretty sure I'm going to sit the D course exam in June, so I expect to be told I'm going to have to work hard on my grammar for a few weeks.

Radio resources for listening practice

I thought I'd share the URL of a great site for helping you practice listening to swedish. It's Sverige Radio's archive. There's pretty much everything here from arts and culture to music and sport.

My girlfriend and I have become fairly addicted to listening to the documentaries which cover subjects as diverse as the first death in Sweden of a football fan caused by the english disease to mudslides in Göteborg in the seventies.

Of particular interest to those with a more basic grasp of Swedish and therefore to me, is the klartext news. This short ten minute programme summarises the day's news in simple swedish and is aimed at students studying the language. It also helps that the presenters also speak slightly more slowly than normal.

You can subscribe to each programme through iTunes (Yes, I know it's a horrible piece of software...) so when they publish a new programme it'll automatically be downloaded for you.

You can also stream channels radio from the site, but I have no idea if they are restricted to computers with a Swedish IP address.

A Night At the Theatre

In keeping with the unspoken laws of language teaching, my homegroup teacher at the Språkverket is somewhat flamboyant and extremely theatrical. It's fairly common for questions to be answered with either song, cod English accents or exaggerated gestures. A particular favourites of hers is singing the "No no, no no no no" bit from the now defunct dutch music combo 2 Unlimited's one and only hit and renditions from musicals.

Given our teacher's obvious thespianism, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of free trips to the theatre, paid for by the SFI programme and ultimately the Swedish tax payer. Not wishing to pass up the opportunity of free entertainment and a break from my usual evening routine, I decided I'd take full advantage of this programme and signed myself up. On Monday night, the hardy souls who were interested (I think there were about 8 of us including two staff members), met at the Bryggteatern in down town Malmö. The site is a restored chocolate factory, which now houses an arts centre for music, dance and theatre. I arrived early, you can never tell what time you'll arrive at your destination with the local bus service, and watched an American and a German dressed in track suits perform a rather strange work out on a nearby set of benches. My theatrically inclined teacher arrived on her bicycle and we exchanged small talk in Swedish about the book I was currently reading and had in my hand.

A few minutes later they opened the door and we went into the theatre and waited for my fellow course mates to arrive. The theatre reception area was lovingly restored from its former use but quite minimalist. The space was divided into a coffee bar and reception desk, and an area of tables and sofas. As the reception area filled up and my fellow SFI course students arrived, we chatted amongst ourselves. Our teacher explained the play we were going to see was about a wedding reception and that it would be about two hours long. Shortly after this brief synopsis, the doors to the theatre opened.

It was a small theatre, with a capacity of about 100 people. We sat in the centre of the seating about halfway up and had an excellent view of the stage. In front of us, was a long table which was under-lit, and a sparse set consisting of a mountain of potatoes and four hot plates on pedestals. On top of each of the hot plates was a pot of gently boiling water.

The play itself, was called "Här och Nu" as was written by a German playwright with the impossibly Teutonic moniker of Roland Schimmelpfennig. It would be performed by a cast chosen from Lund's university theatre studies programme, and was part of their final examination piece.

The play itself was baffling, not principally because of the language, as I found I could follow most of what was being said, but mainly because it had no sequential plot and was highly surreal. In short it was, in my mind, a very experimental and more than a little pretentious piece of work. At the time it all seemed quite deliberately absurd in parts, the cast are all apparently drunk and slightly insane. Although it was strange, I enjoyed the acting and it was entertaining. I imagine the cast had a lot of fun performing it too, and it seemed the perfect fodder for a group of slightly pretentious theatre studies students' final examination.

After the play finished we all concurred we hadn't understood what it was about. Apparently it was just as impenetrable to native Swedish speakers, and confirmed what I'd suspected that although it was well acted (excluding some classic shouty crackers drama student moments), the experimental nature of what we'd seen was confusing.

After I got home from the theatre I googled the playwright and found this summary of the play on the Goethe Institutes' website. It confirmed that the play is experimental and has a deliberately fragmented set of events which may have happened in the past, present or future.

On reflection, although I didn't think much of the play itself, exposure to a language in any form is, in my opinion, an excellent learning exercise. I particularly enjoyed listening to the actors project their voices, and how they ennuicated their lines. I also found it interesting to try and listen for traces of accents. Interestingly, I couldn't hear any Skånsk and they were all very easy to understand.

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.