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.

Speech Therapy

Last night at my language class we had to give an oral presentation. I hate these things. Mainly because my Swedish speaking skill level is by far my weakest point. As I guess it's always the last thing to master for most immigrants. I get so frustrated at not being about to get the message out in the way it exists inside my head. It's like having one arm permanently encased in plaster. Yeah, you can still do stuff, but you know that you used to be able to do it much better. Anyway, that's how it feels to me.

The theme was language and communication. Which was no great surprise given that it is a language class. We were free to take any approach we wanted, with the only requirement being that we had to include a couple of published works from a series of articles (about 30) in a book that we had been given. A few weeks ago one of my classmates gave a really good presentation on how the ability to communicate determines much of your personality and that, once that ability is compromised, your personality can alter. I hadn't thought about that before, but it rang true to me.

There were two of us who presented our topics last night. One guy spoke about the perceived importance of a name and how that importance can vary, depending on cultural or historical traditions. I found it to be really interesting and, like any good presentation, it opened the topic up for discussion at the end of the presentation.

For me, I took a less personal approach and chose a couple of articles that discussed the value and appropriate use of cliques. I enjoyed researching the subject and coming up with my own theories on the future direction of language evolution. It was fun.

The presentation itself wasn't so much fun. We have an "approximate" time limit, and I've always struggled with that in the past. So I spent a lot of time trimming as much fat out of my speech as I could, without losing too much structure. Which wasn't easy. On the other side, I know that I tend to talk fast when I'm nervous, and the clarity of my language starts to suffer. There's a fine line between Swenglish and just plain gibberish. As that's the entire point of the exercise, I was a bit worried about it, and kept forcing myself to slow down my speech the whole time. Which meant that I got pinged a couple of points for running over time. But I got through it.

With any luck that's the last time I'll have to give an oral presentation in class. There's a lot of things hanging up in the air at the moment as to whether or not the class is going to continue. I hope they find a solution because, as much as I hate it, I need the structured class too keep me focused solely on my new language. As a first time language student it's been a real battle. More than I could ever have imagined. And will be for a few years more. I know I've said it before but I'll always be grateful to the Swedish education system. This is not something I could ever have just "picked up" on my own. Without SFI classes to give me that base language grounding, I'm almost certain that I would be back in NZ today. I must send them a Thank You card some time.

Uttal -the follow up

A couple of weeks back I wrote about a vocal assessment we had in my Swedish language class. By "we", I mean myself and my equally semi-articulate Irish companion. This week we had a follow up session with the vocal tutor, together with an interesting discussion on the topic involving the entire class. Ok, there were only 4 of us who made it to class, but it was a good session just the same.

My results were about what I thought they would be. The majority of flaws picked up on were ones that I already knew as a weakness. The curse of the English language, as spoken in NZ, at least, is that it's relatively melody-less. Which puts it in direct conflict with the Swedish spoken language. It's mainly due to English generally not accentuating vowels. Particularly at the end of words, where the English trend is to fade quietly away.. Swedish, on the other hand, likes to celebrate every letter.

A couple of examples of what I mean:

Swedish: Lärare (teacher), English: Lärar.....

Swedish: Undrade (wondered), English: Undrad.....

Putting the stress on the right place in a word is the key to being understood. Even if your pronounciation isn't great, you'll most likely be understood if you've stressed the correct part of the word. That's the trick, and there's no easy solution for a lazy speaking Kiwi. It's a matter of drumming it into your head, time after time. That's where school is great, because there's someone who's sole purpose in life is to pull you up when you sound like a blithering twat.

As I said, getting the stress right is the key to being understood. Get it wrong (like me) and you be on the receiving end of blank stares and endless mocking.

Kliva  på bussen.... Climb aboard the bus

Kliva PÅ bussen... Literally climb on top of the bus.

There's a few rules of thumb when it comes to stressing a word. The most common is in identifying a long or short vowel sound. As a pretty good guide, if a vowel sits in front of 2 consonants then the vowel has a short sound (vitt) and it's the 2 consonants which get stressed. If there is only one consonant after the vowel (vit), then it's the vowel which has a long sound and is stressed. That doesn't hold 100% of the time, but it's a pretty good guide.

Generally a word will have either one or 2 stresses in it. No more than 2. Most often the stress will lie with the first vowel, or with the first group of consonants immediately after the first vowel. Longer words may have a second stresser, or the stress may be moved to the second half of the word. The words which follow this rule are often words that have been borrowed from other languages. Telefon is an example, as it's obviously not an original Swedish word. Sadly it's not always easy to know if a word was came to Swedish from English, or to English from Swedish.

The trap for young players is when you come across a word that is a combination of 2 or more words. The key for pronounciation here is to break that word up into it's original words and stress them that way. Without having a pause between the words. Sounds simple, right ? If only. Of course you can only do that if your vocabulary is large enough so that you can recognise that this new word is actually a combination of several smaller words that you've met before. So a bit of a double hit there.

I know this stuff, but it's not so easy remembering to put it into practice. Not after 40+ years of speaking one way. Many English speakers, and I fall into this group, don't move their mouth much when speaking. Which makes it difficult to stress words and letters. So as well as a mental learning curve, there's also a physical learning curve for me. Not just changing the language I speak in, but changing the way that I speak. There was nothing like that in the brochure.