Reading between the lines

The recent cinema release of the Americanised (why can't they just leave stuff alone ?) version of one of the Stieg Larsson Millennium series books has spurred me into action. About a year ago I bought the set in a local second hand book store. I decided that I was going to start reading Swedish books like a real Swedish person, instead of weaseling my way through with books I had nicked from the childrens section of the public library in order to scrape my way through the Swedish language course requirements. So I had been wandering through the first book when I had the time and the motivation. 700 pages does take a bit of motivation when my attention and concentration maxes out at around 10 pages per session. I had probably read about half of it over a 6 month period. But now it's all hands to the pumps and I'm breaking into the final hundred pages. After all this effort there's no way in hell I'm going to see the movie until I've finished the book.

One of the things I've discovered is my newly acquired ability to quickly detect the writing habits and styles of authors. When the text is in Swedish. In a way that I have never done in English. I guess I'm focusing more on the text these days, instead of simply digesting the content, because the language is still very new to me. If I had to write about the writing style of William Shakespeare, I wouldn't have a clue really. I'd probably end up prowling around in Wikipedia looking for the answers. But I can tell you that, after 600 painstaking pages, I know all of Stieg's favourite words, phrases, sentence structures, and grammatical quirks. I had also read a Marianne Fredriksson book (a very unique and kick arse author who I thoroughly recommend) and found the same thing. Although I never consciously thought about it before now. I don't know that I could do it in English, mind. And I wonder if the average native Swedish speaker could do the same so easily when reading a Swedish book ? Maybe this is one of the few perks of learning a new language.

Another 10 pages tonight and I might almost be finished before the film ends up being sold in the bargains bin at the local video store.

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.

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.

På Svenska

It's tough to prepare for a move to Sweden, and especially, the transition to Swedish. I wish that I had spent more time beforehand. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We had bought a few study books in the 12 months leading up to our move. But I never really opened them in anger. Big mistake if I may say so. There are lots of "Study Guide" books out there, but these worked for me: The first we bought was called "Colloquial Swedish", and is pretty popular. It's an English language book, split into about 20 chapters. Every chapter begins with a short story in Swedish. About 10 or so lines. After the story will be a glossary of new words from that story, and their English meaning. The rest of the chapter will focus on a particular part of Swedish grammar. Each chapter gets progressively more complicated. The book came with a cassette tape, which I have to confess I lost. So never got to find out how effective that was. It's a good book, and explains things well. But can become a little heavy going and, well, boring. While still in NZ, we bought (well, my wife bought, truth be known) a set of 3 books called "På Svenska". The author's name was Ulla Görransson, from memory. Anyway, there was an English book called "studiehäfte", a blue book called "lärobok" and a green book called "övningsbok". The green book was a book full of examples on grammar and sentence structure, while the other two books took you through Swedish by way of normal daily events and situations. Like little stories. They are really good books. But, the best part of the whole thing is that they come also with 3 CDs. Two CDs followed the study books, word for word. So you can follow along quite happily, and get a feel for the spoken word as related to the written word. The third CD contained a lot more examples of the things found in the books. Like, for example, telephone conversations. There are 2 or 3 in the book, which you can listen to while reading the text. But then, there are more (maybe 10) on the CD just to listen to. They mix them up a bit too, so there will be a child speaking first, followed by a teenager, followed by an adult, followed by an older person. Unlike most language tapes, I could actually hear what these people were saying. Personally, I found the "På Svenska" book and CD series to be really good. It is light to read, with lots of pictures, and is rather informal. A good series for kids to read also. They publish the series for many languages, so you need to specify that you want the English version when ordering. I saw that quite a few of my classmates had also bought the series. Once I got here, and particularly once I started with language school, a good "Swedish/English" dictionary (lexikon) was a "must have". The schools have them for use, but you have to leave them at the school, and you have to fight the really tough kids for the use of them. So, best to get your own. The other book I bought was a straight Swedish language dictionary, called "Svensk skolordlista". That was probably one of the best books I have bought. It will give you all the different forms for verbs and nouns, which most of the translation Swedish/English dictionaries don't have. As well as opposites and synonoms. Obviously, being only in Swedish, the definitions of the words are also in Swedish. But that's good also, as a learning tool. REALLY helpful if you get asked to write the definition of a word in class. I ended up using that book instead of the translation dictionary after a couple of months. Definitely recommend investing in that book.

Time and distance

Probably time for a short language update: The Swedish language has two different words for the English word "long". Annoyingly, both versions are very similar in both written and spoken forms. The first "Långt" refers to length, while the other form, "Längt", refers to time. The word Långt also covers for the English word "tall" as well. When some one asks how long (hur lång) you are, they are not referring to a potential sexual encounter. Most probably. They want to know how tall you are. It's not correct to use the Swedish word "hög" instead, which means "high". Even though it might seem to fit better than asking someone how long they are. Time can be expressed in a few different ways: När (which also means "near") means "when" Hur Dags means "what time ?". Längt, as I mentioned, refers to length, or duration, of time. Rather than a specific point in time that the other 2 refer to. Hur dags is used when asking a question. När can also be used in question form, as well as in statement form. When something is to happen right now, it's usual to say "nu är det dags" - "now it's time". Telling the time is uniquely Swedish. As you would guess. It all starts out well enough. Until you get near to the half hour. Then the counting system gets turned on it's head briefly. Here's the guts of it: 25 minutes after the hour is known as "5 minutes before the half hour"; Half an hour past the hour is known as "half an hour before the next hour"; 25 minutes before the hour is known as (hold on to your lunch) "5 minutes after half an hour before the next hour". Then it kind of becomes normal again. So 25 minutes past 4 would be referred to as "5 minutes before half 5". 4:30pm will be EITHER "half five", or 1630. Explains why I'm always an hour late everywhere.

Whodunnit

Well, survived another birthday intact. Pretty quiet affair, really. My brother in law and mother in law arrived round for eftermiddagens (afternoon) fika. Fika is a strange word. It literally means coffee break. But it tends to apply to any type of morning tea, afternoon tea, snack, brunch, or nibble. Any type of food intake that is not covered by breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It includes coffe, of course. And Swedes all appear to drink only black coffee. I don't know, maybe milk is an English thing. But it doesn't stop at coffee. On no. Nope, a fika break always includes several varieties of sweet cakes, bicsuits, buns, and breads. At this point it has progressed way past the point of snack. It's now an officially sanctioned meal. A good rule of thumb is, if you get wind that there may be a fika coming up, starve yourself for several days prior to the event. That night we went out for the evening. Just the 2 of us. which was nice. With work, commuting, language school and horses, we never seem to have a lot of time together apart from collapsing in front of the tv at the end of the day. So it was nice to be almost semi normal as a couple. There's a strange place just outside of our town. Officially it's a Wild West theme park. As one would expect to find in Sweden. Sweden is the home of dansband, so why not. Anyway, they have a large saloon type hall which they use for concerts, shows, corporate dinners, etc. On Saturday night it was a combined dinner and theatre evening. I've always loved live theatre, and Swedes are so enthusiastic actors. Not a lot of Oscars to be won, but they do give it their all. The show itself was a "murder/mystery" evening, played by an acting group touring from the south of Sweden. Just the 5 of them, and one lot of scenery. They played out the performance in 5 parts, stopping for 15 minutes between each part to allow for the next course of dinner to be served. During the break prior to the final act, every member of the audience was given a piece of paper and a pencil, and asked to guess who was the murderer. The true identity was revealed during the gripping final act. All rather exciting. I was really impressed with myself in that I was able to pretty much follow what was going on. Not every word, but enough to comprehend what was being said and what the significance of it was. Well enought to even have an idea about which one of the five actors was the dirty rotten evil scoundrel. Which amazed me. I think it was largely due to it being live theatre. Because actors in theatre performances tend to be a bit over the top with actions, and tend to be quite definite and crisp with the words, it was a lot easy to follow in Swedish than normal conversation. So there's a tip for all fellow new players out there. Go to a Swedish live theatre performance. Just sit there watching and listening for a couple of hours. Between over the top body actions and the slow booming dialogue, you might almost make sense out of it. It's certainly easier than trying to listen to the half dead news presenters on television.