Learning Swedish, episode #724

Are you fluent now, people asked me many times last Christmas break, when I was in Holland. Yes, I replied. I may have sounded more certain than I actually am.

Yes, I can read the Swedish papers almost as fast as the Dutch, I can quite fluently explain what my opinion is about a certain topic and I understand about 90 to 97 percent of every conversation – a percentage that easily goes down whenever a heavy accent is involved or when I feel tired. (And it might go up when I drink too much alcohol, I guess.) People usually understand me as well and even though I happily use Googletranslate when I write mails, I could manage without.

For a long time I have therefore thought that the moment would come that I would be satisfied with my Swedish level. I would understand everything, everyone would understand me and actually I would hardly notice that I’m still living abroad.

It might be my impatience, too high goals or maybe it’s just a factual impossibility, but for the moment there are too many challenges left to relax and lean back.

-          Cooking and food. Did you ever realize how much vocabulary is needed for that? I sincerely think that I better join a theological discussion than that I try to give someone instructions for the preparation of dinner. Useful words as ‘grater’, ‘caster sugar’, ‘sieve’, ‘colander’, ‘dill’ and ‘potato peeler’ only get into my head with lots of effort.

-          Humor and irony. I think irony might be the last what one can learn in a language and that is quite hard in a student house. What does this one housemate really mean: is he teasing me, or does he sincerely think that my bread with chocolate sprinkles looks ‘interesting’? Humor, especially that of the subtle kind, usually goes in an extremely high tempo. Step by step I follow along more and more often, but during the time that I’m thinking about a funny reply, the conversation might have changed topic five times.

-          Slang and cursing words. My student house is maybe a bit too goodish, so actually there is not too much cursing and swearing to be found. I don’t mind that, except that it creates a hole in my knowledge. How do I say that I’m fed up with somebody, without really calling him an idiot? (I mean, I shouldn't be too unkind.) I often use ‘herregud’, in my eyes the equivalent of ‘good heavens’. But might someone else interpret it as a curse of the category ‘goddamn’?! Oops.

-          ‘Det smakar svenskt’, my teacher said every now and then last term, and then we were proud. If your language tastes Swedish, you sound like a Real Swede, somewhat like a Skånish farmer who hasn’t left Teckomatorp for the last fifteen years. To get this level, you need to use many phrasal verbs, as the Swedes love those. (And the Dutch do too, actually.) However, the difference between hålla på med, hålla av, hålla med and hålla ihop (respectively: being busy with, liking, agreeing and being together) is quite hard to remember, so I rather describe such a verb. For the moment I therefore sound very Dutch.

-          The accent. Apparently there’s people who lose it. The current bishop of Lund is originally German and learned Swedish when she was only slightly younger than me. I don’t know how she did it, but in my ears she speaks accent free Swedish. I usually get the question after one and a half sentence ‘where are you from?’ If I let them guess, the answer is usually Germany, France (huh?) and one time – which made me proud – ‘something Nordic’. I think that the only place where I can count as a real Swede is Norway:  the Swedish language sounds already sufficiently strange for the Norwegians, so in Oslo I had the feeling that they guessed my strange dialect would come from some faraway Swedish region, as would my odd grammar... ;-)

Jag kämpar på!