SFI, check!`

I passed the final test of Swedish for Immigrants level 4 this week. Hurray for me! Can I speak Swedish? Well, better than I could in August... but no, not really. I can understand most of what I read (like simple books and newspaper articles) but my conversational Swedish maxes out at making a waxing appointment or ordering a turkey on the phone. All the certificate really means is that now I can start the advanced class called Swedish as a Second Language (SAS-G) in January.

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.

Spinning in Swedish

I went to my first Spin (indoor cycling) class in Sweden yesterday at the gym around the corner called SATS. It was just like a class at home except it sounded like this to me for 55 minutes:

"Blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH, ett, tva, TRE!!! Blah blah blah, ett, tva, TRE!!" (Ett, tva, tre being one, two, three as you probably guessed.)

Aside from the funny talking, the gym is pretty much the same here. Well, except for the shoe situation. People take off their outdoor shoes by the front door and then put on their indoor workout shoes. Now this totally makes sense because it keeps the floors clean, but when I see all those shoes lined up like that I just feel like I'm in kindergarten.

And what do you do if you don't have any indoor shoes with you? Well, apparently you just lift weights without shoes on as I saw a few people doing, to my horror. I've been so brainwashed by our If-I-Hurt-Myself-It's-Your-Fault culture that my brain was going haywire when I saw those bare feet. I swear there were little flashing lights and sirens going off in my brain with a robotic voice saying: "Liability alert, liability alert ... please call personal injury attorney immediately ... liability alert, liability alert ... loss of big toe $2 million, loss of little toe $1 million ... please call attorney immediately."

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.)