The language battle continues

Last night at Swedish class I had a session with a speech teacher. Poor woman. For some odd reason there was only myself and the other native English speaker (a good Irish pal of 2+ years) singled out for this. Not quite sure why that was. Must be desperate times if they've had to resort to calling in a hired gun. Anyway, the goal is to kick out our God aweful accents. Couldn't for the life of me understand this, as I'm pretty sure I don't have an accent, or brytning. Anyway, we had been given a set text of about 90 seconds long to read over the Easter break. I don't have the heart to tell the dedicated teaching staff, but I did run the text through Google Translate first. So I'd at least have a vauge notion about the sounds I was about to repeat. Then last night, we each sat in an office with the speech expert, and read the text for recording onto a computer. Presumably to end up on YouTube some time soon. Officially we wait for her to listen to our recordings, stop dying of laughter, and then come back to us with "tips" on how we can improve our spoken Swedish. I'm pretty sure that my Tip is going to be the suggestion that I consider taking up sign language. Will be interesting either way.

I'm enjoying this class, but it's certainly much tougher going. A lot more focus on obscure grammar which I had never studied for English, let alone Swedish. My vocabulary is slowly but surely increasing, and I'm making more of an effort to try out new words. Of course sometimes that means words that I've simply made up because they sound sort of Swedish. But it gets the message across. It's been quite difficult to increase my vocabulary beyond that initial learning burst, because I tend to be talking about the same things all the time at work or at home. So I'm pretty good when it comes to the parts of a horse, or how a building goes together. Not so good when it comes to remembering names for different foods. I'm going to have to be a lot more proactive with that battle. I'm quite pleased that I now know a few alternative words that mean roughly the same thing. So if I forget one, as I did last night, I can fire in a relacement which, although not quite meaning the same thing, gives me a bit of time to search back and come up with the correct term. Short term confusion for everyone, but it ends up being ok. Strengthening up my storage of synonyms is the current project for me in class. And that's kind of fun. Clearly I need to get out more.