kareina

My sister, A, just sent me a facebook introduction to some friends of hers who have moved to Sweden from the US, and suggested that we chat about being an American in Sweden. I promptly thought of lots of things I wanted to say, and then realized that it wouldn’t be polite to do an info dump into a FB chat window, so I thought I would type it all here and just give them a link instead. (L & H, if you happen to have an LJ account leave me a comment here; otherwise I will see you over on FB.)

This is all written with the assumption that you actually want to learn Swedish. If you happen to be one of those people with no interest in learning another language you have come to the right place—nearly everyone in Sweden between 15 and 50 (an many more older and younger than that) is fluent in English, so you can get by without ever learning more than “tack”, “hejdå”, and “precis” and you needn’t bother reading further.

My sister tells me that you are an avid reader; I am too, and I think this was the thing that helped me the most when I moved to Sweden. When I arrived I decided that I wasn’t going to read fiction in English, only in Sweden, and I got my hands on Swedish translations of books I had read many times before in English. By reading books I knew and loved I was free to just read without having to bother with a dictionary to look words up, since I knew what the words had to mean before I read them. (Ok, sometimes I had to look things up, but it was like once or twice a chapter rather than several times a paragraph like it was when reading things in the Swedish textbook.) After reading a few old favourite books I started adding Swedish children’s books into the mix, and found that my vocabulary was already up for the job.

My written vocabulary. It actually took me several years before I could listen to a conversation in Swedish and follow most of it. Why? Because all of the words I knew and understood to look at turn out to have a drastically different pronunciation than I expected from the letters in them. What I am doing now, and what I wish I had started doing years ago is to listen to audio books at the same time as I read the text. Why didn’t I start this sooner? Because I have never cared for audio books—I grew up with a hearing problem, and depend on reading lips to help supplement the sounds I hear when people speak, and even then I don’t always catch what is said. I don’t listen to audio books in English if there is any way to avoid it (besides, human speech is so slow! I could read three English books in the time it would take to listen to one being read out loud). However, I find that I am enjoying listening and reading the text at the same time, and it has made a huge difference in my own ability to pronounce things in Swedish, and in my ability to recognize words when I hear them in conversation.

The other thing I wish I had known from the beginning is the difference between the “svensk för nybörjar” class offered at the local university, which is aimed at exchange students, and the “svensk för invandringar” class offered by the government. I took the former soon after I arrived, because it was easy to find out when and where it met and how to sign up for it. I had problems finding info for the sfi course, so didn’t bother. Until, after three years of living here, when I finally had enough Swedish to carry on a reasonable conversation one-on-one, but still had major problems following rapid Swedish conversations between a bunch of native speakers, when I asked a friend who has been living here 15 years how long it had taken him to get to the point where he could follow conversations in Swedish. “Six months.” I expressed my shock and disbelief, and he replied that the sfi course meets four hours a day, so of course one gets there quickly. My Swedish for beginners course had met only 2 hours a week, and I only took the first year before I was traveling too much for work to be able to continue. Therefore I tried again and this time found out how to enrol in sfi, and managed to do well enough on the entrance exam (which, of course, is primarily reading/writing, which is my strength) to get placed in the highest level class. That was in February, and since then I have made huge progress on my ability to speak and understand spoken Swedish (and I started that whole audio book while reading thing). I have just left day one of the national exam to be done with the Swedish for immigrants course, and think I did fine on it (was done with the reading part in 30 minutes of the 80 allotted, and only had to guess on some of the questions for the hearing part).

My other advice is to sing songs in Swedish! Join a choir or other singing group, or just click on my "learn Swedish one song at a time" button in the list of tags on the right side of this page and you can learn the songs I have worked on in the past several years (or at least the ones I took the time to post here).

I hope you like living in Sweden as much as I have; it is a delightful place to live.

As regular readers will remember, I sing with the student choir at the University here in Luleå. For the past couple of years we have been heavily recruiting exchange students and have maintained a good mix of people from all over the world, though, of course, the faces change each year and, for many of them, each semester. The new semester started last week, and already we have our first gig of the season: performing at the banquet welcoming the newest crop of Exchange Students to Sweden. However, most of the choir isn't available for this performance (even lord_kjar is out of town this weekend. There are only four of us who are able to participate--one soprano, me (alt), and two tenors. One of the tenors is Swedish and the president of the choir, the other two are exchange students themselves. Therefore, given the limited number of people for this gig, rather than actually doing full choir arrangement we have opted on a simpler set:

The president and I will be introduced as ambassadors for the student choir, come to invite them all to come participate with us on Tuesdays, and we will welcome them to Sweden with a traditional Swedish drinking song. As soon as we start with "Helan går!", the choir exchange students will stand up at their place and sing the reply, and then walk up to join us on the stage, where we will give the full song another run through, in unison. Then after we sing that one our president will announce that he understand that the dinner has a theme for the evening of Cartoons/comics, and will point out that our choir has a new mascot, the spider pig (which one of the exchange students will be wearing as a placard on his chest). Then we will sing the Spider Pig song (which I had never heard of before Tuesday--I am so out of touch with popular culture, I didn't even know there was a movie for that cartoon family). After we sing the line "can he swing from a web?", I will snatch away the spider pig, turn him back right side up, and sing a solo "No he can't! He's a pig!", before the soprano snatches the pig back from me to turn it back into a spider pig for the song finale. Then we will tell the crowd that if they join us on Tuesday they can hear this song done in full four-part choir arrangement, and take our leave.

I think it will be fun, and I can't believe that I, whom my friends used to tell me not to sing with them because I sang in a monotone "and it throws the rest of us off", will be singing a solo! I have come a very, very long way. With luck it will get even better soon. Another of our choir members teaches voice lessons, so we will be meeting up on Sunday afternoon to trade a singing lesson for a massage.

The drinking song we will be singing is extremely well known throughout Sweden, and in a fair few other places as well:

Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lej
Och den som inte helan tar*
Han heller inte halvan får
Helan går
(Drink)
Sjung hopp faderallan lej


Which roughly translates to:

The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
and those who don't take the whole (drink in one go)
he cannot have half of it either
sing fa la la...


As our president was teaching us the words tonight I commented that "I need to remember that 'får' rhymes with 'går', and not 'tar' so that I pronounce it correctly". Therefore I was highly amused to come home and read on the Wikipedia page for this song that "*In the classic version, "trår" is used instead of "tar". "Tar" is modernized, and doesn't rhyme." Edited to add: Our Choir president replies "Well, in this one case I'd argue the modernization is an improvement anyway. "Trår" means "yearn", which doesn't really makes as much sense as "tar"." I argue that he is mistaken--I think "those who don't yearn (to drink) the whole (glass in one go) can't have half of it either." works just fine.

I have been gearing up to working longer and more enthusiastically as some major deadlines approach (which was severely interrupted by the Double Wars trip and recovery thereof), and that really showed this week. Yesterday I put in a 14 hour work day, but much of that was fun time spent hanging out with loved ones as they helped me with a ( project for work )

We were all having so much fun working on the project that we were still at work after midnight. She was sensible and hung up to go to sleep soon after midnight, but he and I kept going till nearly 02:00. I love it when work projects hold my attention so long!

Unsurprisingly, I woke up this morning thinking of databases, and wondering if I want to actually try to develop a database to hold all of my data,rather than the series of spreadsheets I am using now. I considered that back at the start of the project, but the list of all the different data types is so long and so complexly organized I gave up on the idea. Perhaps if I get that grant approved and the project goes on after November it will be worth the effort to do a conversion from spreadsheets to database.

Now it is time to head to the last choir performance of the semester: the farewell dinner for the exchange students, and we are the entertainment. This makes sense, since about half of our choir is exchange students this term. I hope we draw as many new exchange students next year, or our numbers will be sadly diminished. Luckily the slogan "learn Swedish, one song at a time" is a good one.

This weekend, while many of my friends across the Known World attended 12th Night Coronations in one Kingdom or another I attended a very different sort of event: Trettonhelgskurser (which Google Translate says means "Twelfth Night Courses", even though "tretton" is 13), a weekend of classes sponsored by the Svenska Folkdansringen (Swedish Folk Dance Ring). Unlike many SCA events which are based around attending many different classes in many different subjects, these courses were each designed to run the full weekend. One could either take the class in dance, or in singing folk songs, or in playing music, or in woodworking, or in costumes for folk dance. However, even though most of us would have been interested in more than one class, each class ran for the full weekend, so we could only take one.

lord_kjar and I decided to go with the folk song class, in part because I need more help with singing than with dance, and in part because of my quest to learn Swedish, one song at a time. I think this class helped with that.

Two full days of class time was enough for us to learn eight songs. Now, when I say "learn eight songs", I mean that for each song we learned the words and melody plus one, or more often several, alternate tunes for the song. Not like in a choir, where people are grouped according to which range they sing in, and each group learns a tune that combine nicely. Nope, in Swedish folk singing *everyone* learns each tune for a given song, and then we divide up and sing multiple parts at once, and then we may switch which groups sing which version of the tune, or, perhaps, some individuals will switch groups.

With luck I will make time to translate each of these songs and share them here, since it has been quite a while since I did an entry for the "learn Swedish one song at a time" series.

I will share one of them now, because the translation is easy:

( Vi ska dansa med Sara )

Hopefully I will have a link to the tune up soon--when that happens I will edit it. If you want to hear it before that happens poke me.

How else was this event different from the SCA events I have attended? ( Well, the best way to answer that is with a description. )

Oops, I just looked at the clock, it is later than I had hoped--I still need to read my 1000 and do my yoga, and I have to drive to Boliden for work in the morning (1.5 hour drive). I will be there till Thursday evening, when I return home so that I can attend my exam to get new hearing aids on Friday. Then next week I will head back there for the first half of the week, then home to pack and get ready for the Scotland trip.

I haven't posted the recent songs I've been learning in Swedish because they are a bit more complicated that the lullabies that archinonlive started me with. I joined the choir (kör in Swedish) that he sings with at the university, and some of the songs we sing are in Swedish. The first of these I have been working on is song number nine in my list of Swedish songs. It is a a song that was written in Swedish to a previously existing piece of classical music. The author must have had a sense of humor because the song speaks of standing in line. Appernetly, so far as the author of the song was conserned Swedes spend far too much of their lives standing in line, and this was worth singing about. here is a link to some other choir singing the song, as you can tell, while the topic is odd, the effect of the different voices is rather pretty.

( here are the lyrics to the song, and a very rough translation )

I've been busy and didn't post the final verses for song #8. Granted, I don't have the final couple completely committed to memory yet, either, though they are getting close.

( song 8, verses 3, 4 & 5 )

I have just started learning my seventh song in my quest to learn Swedish, one song at a time. This bring my total Swedish vocabulary to 121 words, of which there are 65 nouns, 50 verbs, 3 proper names, 2 articles, 4 conjunction, 2 interjection, 20 numbers, 6 nonsense words, 9 prepositions, 23 adjectives, 20 adverbs, and 17 pronouns. It will be some time before I can actually use these words, but I will find out next week when I get to Sweden if I can recognize these words use in conversation, or if I only know them in the context of their songs.
( words for first verse of song #8 )

This week I am starting to get my average hours of work for the month back up to a reasonable number. Starting the month with four days off of work when I went to the UK for the SCA dance event made for a *very* low total average number of hours worked per day. However, I have managed to pull the average up to about 27 hours/week so far this month, which isn't bad given how low it started. And the month is only half over, so it might be possible to bring it up within target range, too.

Now that I've got that spreadsheet to track my vocabulary I'm learning, one song at a time, it is taking me about an hour each day to put a new song into the spreadsheet and look up all of the new words, during which time I listen to all of the songs on a loop before I then switch to playing only the new one I'm trying to learn today. Doing the one verse of a song a day technique has brought me to 111 words learned already! Can I use any in a conversation? No, not really at this point, but I suspect that by learning to sing my lessons I will have better long term retention of the words. ( today's song )

Progress report: I have *finally* managed to go through all of the geologic literature I can find which mentions rocks containing talc or anthophyllite and extract the data (if any) on the compositions of those two minerals and of the bulk rock composition (if listed) and get it into the correct format for using mathmatica to plot that data on graphs side by side with my data. Both my talc and my anthophyllite in my experiments contains a fair bit more iron than the natural samples do, but plotting *all* of the data I could find gives a nice diagonal band on the Mg-Fe graph, with my data on the end of the range higher in Fe, and the natural rocks on the end higher in Mg. I've e-mailed my boss with all of the resultant graphs, but he's at a conference in California this week (same one I went to last winter), so no idea when he will see it.

Yesterday I did the preliminary polish my latest experiment and got the second coat of epoxy added (we polish only deep enough to remove a tiny portion of the gold capsule, then add more epoxy to hold the contents together before doing the final polish). I really need to do that final polish tomorrow and get it turned into the microprobe lab for a carbon coating (because otherwise the microprobe won't be able to properly "see" the sample) because I am scheduled for another microprobe session on Monday and/or Tuesday (when he booked the time my boss wasn't certain if he'd need to use some of it, too).

I haven't made any progress on actually writing up my results, but I am getting much closer to having results ready to write up. I have also applied for a bunch more jobs, and even heard back from one which had indicated some time back that I was on the short list--they want to do skype interviews in January.

Today I started some real packing of household goods--I took my armour out of the nice decorated wooden box in which it normally lives and put it back into the old cloth armour bag, and then put my favourite breakable kitchen toys into the box wrapped in clothing I don't need to take with me while travelling, and cushioned with some of my stuffed animals. I have no idea where on earth this box will be shipped, but the contents should arrive safely.

In 16 days and a bit I fly to Sweden, with luck (and some major effort on my part) I should be able to accomplish everything that needs to be done before I go.

I have just spent two hours creating a spreadsheet to track my Swedish vocabulary as I learn it. Yes, this is the sort of thing I do for fun while I am meant to be working on something else. The three songs I have learned thus far give me a vocabulary of 56 unique words (and some variants thereof). This includes 12 verbs, 11 nouns, 9 pronouns, 8 adverbs, 5 adjectives, and three or fewer of each of the other parts of speech.

I am using this web page to check my understanding of the words before I enter them. I love the internet--who needs a paper dictionary if they have a connection?

My spreadsheet has rows for the number of the word, the word itself, the article if it is a noun, the meaning, the part of speech, the tense (if it is a verb--this is where most of the variants come in--where the song gives the past tense I also add in the present tense version, giving me bonus vocabulary), the context (line of the song where the word first appeared), the number of the song, and the date I entered the word into the spreadsheet (this might be important later).

I was quite surprised when I finished filling in the spreadsheet to see how much time had elapsed. It didn't seem like that long while I was doing it. Now to see if I can apply this same sort of motivation to the research I'm meant to be doing today...

For much of my life the goal "learn another language" has been on my to-do list, but it hasn't managed to get high enough on that list to actually be accomplished. Oh, sure, I've made a few half-hearted attempts at that goal, but the've all petered out fairly quickly.

( the list of language classes I can remember taking )

Learning a language is still on my to-do list, and with my upcoming travels in Sweden I've got yet another opportunity. This time I'm starting it by learning Swedish, one song at a time. My friend archinonlive has been teaching me songs, and has expressed a willingness to teach more when I head up to visit him next month. Sunday's song was a lullabye ( Trollmor )

and Monday's song was ( Blinka lilla stjärna )

When my friend Lyn visited on Saturday to help me eat birthday cake she brought me a gift of a lovely leather covered notebook with what looks to be hand-made paper inside. I have decided to use it to write down the songs as I learn them, so I can keep them with me, and I will also share them here for your amusement. The hard part will be forcing my hand-writing to look nice enough to belong in such a pretty book.

Edited a secong time to add: He's now got a web page with the recordings on it, you can listen to Trolmor on that link or to Blinka lilla stjärna on that one.

Edited to add: should any of you want to hear these songs, let me know and I can e-mail you the file of him singing them, since he's been nice enough to record them for me.