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Doviende’s Swedish Log (TAC2010 - Team J) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 1 of 65 07 December 2009 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm doing some preparatory work on Swedish before I dive in fully. I'll be working through the FSI pronunciation guide, as I've found those useful for other languages in the past. Later this month I'll probably do a bunch of L-R, since I ordered a book with an audiobook from bokus.com.
My first impression is that Swedish spelling is no as closely tied to pronunciation as German seems to be. That shouldn't be too much of a problem since I plan to do a lot of L-R, so hopefully I'll just naturally catch on to each word. Right now I just want to try to learn the different possibilities for the sounds, so that I can try to hear those particular things when I'm listening. I've already learned that there's an important distinction between long and short vowels, so I'll have to listen for that. I've done some very basic general reading about Swedish grammar, just to see what's out there. I'm planning to stick a few dozen of the most common verbs into Anki just to get basic familiarity before I start doing L-R, and I might do the same with common adjectives. I find that if I know those highly-used verbs and adjectives, then the nouns can be pretty easy to guess based on context, so we'll see if that applies to swedish. When I start the L-R work on my christmas holidays, I'm hoping to do a very intensive study program so that I'm doing at least 3 hours per day, to try to engage the full powers of L-R and to get my brain jump-started. Each day I want to have random Swedish phrases popping into my head throughout the rest of the day, which would hopefully indicate that my brain is working full time on figuring it out even when I'm not listening. I'll put up some more details here once I finish my preliminary prep work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5800 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 2 of 65 08 December 2009 at 12:54am | IP Logged | ||
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where are you getting your L-R material from?
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 3 of 65 08 December 2009 at 1:02am | IP Logged | ||
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So far I'm just ordering swedish books and swedish audiobooks from bokus.com. They seem to have quite a few audiobooks on there, and some of them are even available as mp3. I'm starting with The Hobbit, because I'm currently reading it in German so I'm familiar with the story. In the next while I'll have to think about what else I want to read. I might go for another familiar one, like Harry Potter #4 or #5 (which i just read in German), and then later on I could probably try something totally new like some original Swedish books, but that will have to wait until I'm more familiar with the language.
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 4 of 65 08 December 2009 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology is quite an interesting article, at least from a linguistics perspective. A lot of it has practical use though, which is mainly what I was looking for. The description of swedish tones could have used more examples though.
I really liked the reading at the very end of the article, which has a phonetic transcription so that you can see where the tones are supposed to happen. Swedish just gets more fascinating the more I learn about it. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 5 of 65 08 December 2009 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've started on the short series of Pimsleur Swedish (10 lessons). Done the first two so far. It's nice having audio, because I can listen to them while I'm at work. The other thing I've done at work is listen to an hour of a Harry Potter audiobook in Swedish, and an hour of another audiobook I found online.
It's quite interesting to listen to something that I have absolutely no comprehension of, because lately I'm used to working on German where I get almost everything. In Swedish, if I don't pay attention then it's basically just a wall of sound, but I find that if I concentrate hard on listening to every syllable, then I can guess a couple of the words (mostly guessed from German). Overall, I'm trying not to worry about what I understand for the next while, because my main listening goal is to accustom myself to the sounds of the language, and to test this idea of doing lots of listening to native materials right from the beginning. Right now I'm listening for vowel length and vowel quality, and also for the tones on some of the words. After doing Mandarin, the tones in Swedish seem fairly simple. I'm still trying to listen for the alternate "sh" sort of sound that I've read about, but I haven't been able to hear it yet. I guess I should make a numerical goal for hours of listening, so I have something to aim for. I suppose I can do 3 hours of listening on every day shift at work, so that'll be 27 hours over the next 9 work days. That'll take me right up until my christmas holidays, so I can re-evaluate at that point, and my new book will probably be delivered by then, so I can do L-R from that point forward. total listening hours: 4 / 27 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 65 09 December 2009 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
Yes! For me it's vice versa. Any Mandarin tone combination exists in my Swedish accent. Who knows, maybe you'd grasp Swedish pronunciation in no-time if you chose Gotlandic. ;) If you haven't already noticed that, you will find that the tone changes don't sound exactly the same in each accent, so it's good to expose yourself to a lot of voices. Listen to news, local radio stations (there's one for every county in Sweden), audiobooks (you're already doing that)... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 7 of 65 09 December 2009 at 2:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Ya, any tips are appreciated. I actually just read some stuff that was explaining that the tones differ in different places. I'll have to listen more carefully. It's still early, but I've got a variety of audiobooks to work through.
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| Shadow1984 Groupie United States Joined 5488 days ago 53 posts - 57 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 8 of 65 10 December 2009 at 3:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I actually find Mandarin to be intimidating because of the use of tones. It is on my want to learn list in the future however. Was it hard for you to get these different tones down?
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