No, you can't say "lovely"

Some of you may be familiar with Madonna. Or maybe not. And maybe you know she married a British guy named Guy and soon afterward started spouting Briticisms with a bad British half-accent on TV. For the American public, this was bad news for Madonna because Americans don't like, in fact they really really really don't like, a snob, and anyone trying to sound British is, by definition, a snob.

I sort of feel for Madonna. Perhaps she was trying to be all poncey, but maybe, just maybe, she was just living 24 hours a day with an Englishman surrounded by English serving people (or whatever she has) and the Briticisms just sort of happened. (Not sure about the accent, that seems highly suspect.) This is my defense anyway, for the fact that I've caught myself saying someone was a "git" or the cake was "nice" as in yummy or "I would do, but..." when, in fact, these are not acceptable American English terms and there are many nice American ways of saying these things.

However, there is a limit to what is acceptable if you are an American married to a Brit or living in Britain. And here it is: You may never, under any circumstances, say "cheers" or "ta" instead of "thanks." (My big pet peeve is people who go to England or Australia for 5 minutes and come home saying "cheers" like it just SLIPPED into their vocabulary and they didn't even notice. Oh, you're SO international!) You may also never, ever say "lovely." It may be acceptable to write "lovely" on certain occasions, as in "that would be lovely" or "it would be lovely to see you," but I'm sorry, it never sounds right with an American accent (and worse with a fake English accent) and what's so bad about "that would be nice" anyhow?

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.

The Esperanto Effect

My friend Merel has a theory that your brain has room for one native language, one foreign language you speak really well, and then a third spot for one other language (in her case Dutch, English, and, depending on her location, French, German or Swedish). I like her theory, but in my case that third spot is not for one single, functioning language, but a mish-mash of all the languages I have ever taken but don't speak that well. Let's call it the Esperanto Effect because alliteration is nice.

Over the years I have taken French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. My German is still passable, but sadly all of the others have just left little puzzle pieces in my brain that fit oddly together, creating weird verbal pictures, when I feel forced to speak any of these languages. (Except Russian. Nothing ever stuck from college Russian because my brain was thinking "if I learn this crazy language that has even more cases than German, she might actually want to take me to that cold, cold place where all they talk about in the textbooks are bribes, frozen muddy boots and stalled trains!") At any rate, the results of the Esperanto Effect are embarrassing, of course, but also fascinating, like watching your brain work something out. In Stockholm, for example, Sonja and I went to an Italian restaurant where the owner spoke only Italian and Swedish. I wanted to ask for some noodles with butter and cheese for Julian and this is what came out:

"Vorrei en poquito portion pasta med burro och parmigiano para bebe, tack."

Sad, very sad. Do you know how much 3 years of college Italian costs??!! But the owner just said "si" and was off and did, in fact, bring what I was hoping to get. Now that's the beauty of Sweden, compared to say, oh, I don't know, FRANCE maybe?? As long as they get your meaning, they don't snigger about the details. Or maybe they're just embarrassed for you and want to be gone as soon as possible so they can snigger in the other room, I'm not sure.

(The picture at the top is from a store we saw in Stockholm that sold leather goods. Gross skin, indeed.)