Tala Svenska

My friend and I decided to do a Swedish evening class.

I know! Like we haven't got enough to do.

Anyway, we missed the first class, which seems to have put us at a major disadvantage. But we have been to the last three classes and I think that now I can safely say I can speak three sentences in Swedish (and they are all quite short and would be useless in an emergency situation).

I must be one DVD short of a box set! I spend all day translating from German to English, and occasionally from English to German, and one day the other week I even translated from French to German. And now I am spending one precious evening a week learning another foreign language!

The teacher has the approach of, the more she speaks just in Swedish, the more knowledge we will kind of just acquire through osmosis, or similar. This has the effect that I, at least, stare blankly at her for a lot of the time, probably with my mouth open. And sometimes I actually laugh because some of the words sound like English with the Swedish chef speaking them.

Honestly, how ignorant is that of me! If I were teaching someone English and they were laughing I might just get up and walk out!

Last night my friend had to formulate a question from some of the pictures in the exercise book and she thought that the picture of a bed (which stood for a hotel) was a picture of an elk. It did look like an elk and other people in the class also thought it was an elk. It came out as a very strange sentence. I laughed so much that I actually cried.

I think, though, it is because the class is so late (from 7:45 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.) that I find it so exhausting. It is a bit of a shame, as it has long been my ambition to learn Swedish.