Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Learning Swedish / Lära sig Svenska

I've made it to level 2 of Rosetta Stone for Swedish and while it has been a great help, I'm not really feeling like what I'm learning is really sticking with me. Luckily, my job provides me with Level 1 Swedish at a local University, Folkuniversitetet.
Last week I started the 5 week introduction to Swedish course and I have to say, I feel like I'm learning much more than I have been by teaching myself through Rosetta Stone. I'll definitely continue to use Rosetta Stone after I finish the course, I will still have a whole lot to learn! In the course there are about 10 other students from all around the world, not one of us is from the same country, but we all speak English so we are at lest able to communicate a little bit. We have textbooks and we get homework assignments after every class.
The teacher is very intent on teaching in the immersion style and she will not acknowledge you are saying something if you don't ask in Swedish. This will no doubt be great practice and an efficient way to learn Swedish but it's been very frustrating when we all only know about 20 words - combined - in Swedish and the teacher wont straighten out our confusion. On top of that the teacher has us break up into groups of 2 to practice and I seem to always get people who want to correct my pronunciation (I think I'm not even close to pronouncing everything correctly) and it's confusing me to have the teacher pronounce a word one way and my study buddy telling me to say it another way and I'm sure I'm saying it some third way. But no one ever said learning another language is easy! The course only lasts 5 weeks and depending on how it goes I might continue out of my own pocket, I haven't decided yet. I very much doubt I'll be bilingual by the end of the year but I would like to at least be able to hold a little bit of a conversation.
Love Always,
Matilda

2 comments:

Charlie said...

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Anonymous said...

Mattie, I love the blog! It is so much fun to learn of your adventures. Great pictures also.
IKEA opens in Fall in Denver. I love this store.
Hugs,
Carmen

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