Skriftlig Blues

Last night at language school we had to write an essay selected from a choice of language related themes. We had to write on the school computers and then save it on a USB stick for the teacher. Which was fair enough. Although, whatever happened to writing by hand, I'll never know. But anyway, for one of the few times in my life, I caught a break when I discovered that one of the topic choices was the same topic as I had used for my oral presentation the week before. It doesn't usually work like that. Typically we have to report on a set topic in a choice of writing styles. It can be as a straight report, and investigative angle, or as a debate. I often just start writing and then figure out, about half way through, which style my text is going to be best suited to. But last night was a bit more straight forward.

It went ok, I think. The verdict comes out next week. I was a bit disappointed to discover that access had been blocked to my ever trusty on-line Swedish-English dictionary, and to Google Translate. I must confess that I do use Google Translate quite a lot. Most often just to get me started. I can fire down thoughts in English, take the Swedish translations and use them to build my text around. Instead of having to start from scratch. Now, before anyone starts crying foul, I have to say, in my defence, that I seldom leave the Google Translate text in it's original copied form. Unless it's obvious that there's only one way to write something. Early on our teacher told us that she had seen some much Google Translate text that it was dead easy to spot. And she's right. I can spot it without too much effort when a Swede has used the same programme to translate back into English. It often is a bit too literal and just doesn't hang right. Knowing that she's on the hunt for any rogue translators, I take a bit of time to move the text around to a more sensible format and to add my own touches to it. But it does give a good start.

Not having access to an on-line Swedish-English dictionary was a bit un-necessary I thought. Especially when we had hard copies of translation dictionaries in front of us to use. But there must have been some reason for it. We also had a copy of Natur och Kulturs Stora Svenska Ordbok which is, in my opinion, one of the best books a person can have when studying Swedish. As well as being a dictionary it also shows all the different ways a word can be used, giving practical examples and normal expressions for each situation. A very handy book, and I refer to it a lot.

The main stumbling block last night, was actually our teacher. I guess she had nothing else to do while we were all writing, but could she not have found something better to do than to laugh every couple of minutes at comments on her friends' Facebook pages ? To be fair, she was kind enugh to read the comments out loud to us. So that we wouldn't feel left out. Didn't really help my efforts though. To show that she really was considerate, she announced after about 20 minutes that we were all going to stop for a coffee break. Which turned out to be a 45 minute natter session in the teachers' lounge. In the end I just got up and announced I was going back to the computer suite. No one else seemed to take the hint, included the teacher, so I was alone in the room for another 15 minutes. Which was probably the most productive period of the evening.

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.