Swedish for Immigrants

Last month I started my first Svenska för Invandrare (SFI) course. This is the free Swedish class that's offered to all immigrants to Sweden. For some strange reason I was placed in level D, which supposes, I assume, that I know enough Swedish to pass levels A-C. Since I can't say anything except "Hi, can I please have a cappuccino and a cinnamon roll," I wonder what exactly was going on in levels A-C, but oh well, it's actually going fine.

Thanks to German, I can understand quite a bit of written Swedish. Someone told me that Swedish and German share 70% of their words. Well, I'm not going to count, but it does seem to help, except I get confused with the spelling. Here are a couple examples:

förbund (S), Verbund (G), alliance (E)
ansikte (S), Ansicht (G), face (E)
handflata (S), Handfläche (G), palm (E)
regeringen (S), Regierung (G), government (E)

Anyway, I won't bore you with any more, but you get my point(s): the German vocab helps a lot and Swedish is going to screw up my German spelling big time.

Now let me say that if I pass the level D test the end of October I will be living proof that SFI doesn't work, because although I can read a decent amount, I cannot actually SPEAK Swedish, and shouldn't communicating with others be a primary goal of the course? I know you'll be waiting with baited breath for my results. Patience, my friends.

I'll have to get a couple of pictures of my fellow students because we're a motley crew of people from all over the globe (lots of people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, and other countries the U.S. has bombed/invaded/embargoed etc. - makes for nice between-lessons chit-chat). It's pretty good seeing us all sitting there practicing prounouncing vowels. Eeeeee. Oooooo. Uuuuu. Ääääääää. Ååååååå. Yyyyyyy.