{"id":711,"date":"2012-04-13T16:05:25","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T14:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/?p=711"},"modified":"2016-01-26T01:11:56","modified_gmt":"2016-01-25T23:11:56","slug":"learning-swedish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/learning-swedish\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Swedish!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Attention:<\/strong> If you want to learn or improve your Swedish, please try my Interlinear Swedish bilingual book<\/a>. This book is a Swedish book by Selma Lagerl\u00f6f translated in the innovative Interlinear format, where the translation is provided below each word. Such format lets you read and improve your Swedish easily regardless of your level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been learning Swedish in April. Here’s what I’ve been doing it:<\/p>\n

Reading Harry Potter in Swedish.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I got the Swedish and the English book as well as the Swedish audiobook of Harry Potter and I’m reading it in Swedish while looking at an English translation to understand the parts that I’ve missed in Swedish (which is currently still a lot).<\/p>\n

I find that once I have finished reading a paragraph and read the English translation, I generally have little problem following through in Swedish. This is, I guess, an advantage of English being so close to Swedish.<\/p>\n

You can try it out for yourself if you’re interested. Here’s an example Swedish paragraph that looks hard but then, after having read the English translation, becomes easier:<\/p>\n

Jag f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker inte visa mig modig eller n\u00e5nting s\u00e5nt genom att s\u00e4ga namnet”, sade Harry, “jag visste bara inte att man inte borde g\u00f6ra det. Fattar du vad jag menar? Jag har massor att l\u00e4ra mig … och jag sl\u00e5r vad om”, tillade han och gav f\u00f6r f\u00f6rsta g\u00e5ngen uttryck \u00e5t n\u00e5gonting som hade oroat honom p\u00e5 sista tiden, “jag sl\u00e5r vad om att jag \u00e4r s\u00e4mst i klassen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in English:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not trying to be brave or anything, saying the name,\u201d said Harry, \u201cI just never knew you shouldn\u2019t. See what I mean? I\u2019ve got loads to learn… I bet,\u201d he added, voicing for the first time something that had been worrying him a lot lately, \u201cI bet I\u2019m the worst in the class.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another thing I found is that my limited German knowledge is coming in very handy while learning Swedish. Just in the last paragraph, words like f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker (versuchen – try), att s\u00e4ga (sagen – say), visste (wissen – know), menar (meinen – mean) and so on immediately crop up to mind.<\/p>\n

After all of this reading and listening at the same time, I also relisten to the audio files without text later on. While doing this, I find that sometimes I can pretty much follow the meaning while at other times some paragraphs just look to obscure to understand even though I had sort of translated them beforehand.<\/p>\n

I think this might also have to do with the kind of translation I’m doing while reading: I do not focus on every single word and I just try to get the gist of the story. I do this because there often appear words that I am just very unlikely to need in the near future. Words like “armchair”, “clay bricks” and so on. While these are words I will ideally want to know, these are not words I really need to know now when I still don’t know many basic words like “outside”, “pen”, “table”, etc. I don’t avoid learning these more complex words but I just don’t focus on them.<\/p>\n

At this point, I think I will gradually be able to absolve more and more Swedish and understand more and more of what’s being said. I might need to up the ante a little bit and increase the speed with which I’m doing my reading but otherwise I should be all good (I attempt to finish reading Harry Potter before I go to Sweden, this means that I will have to double my 5 minutes per day worth of audiobook reading speed). What will soon be lacking, however, is practice.<\/p>\n

I would love to have a Michel Thomas sort of a course at this point but since there aren’t any (and Pimsleur is expensive and a bit too far-fetched), I’ll be looking into other options. What exactly? I’m not quite sure yet but I guess we will soon seen.<\/p>\n

Attention:<\/strong> If you want to learn or improve your Swedish, please try my Interlinear Swedish bilingual book<\/a>. This book is a Swedish book by Selma Lagerl\u00f6f translated in the innovative Interlinear format, where the translation is provided below each word. Such format lets you read and improve your Swedish easily regardless of your level.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been learning Swedish in April. Here’s what I’ve been doing with it, and what you can learn from my attempts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":986,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions\/986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}