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Dori learns languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dori Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4516 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Swedish, Japanese | Message 1 of 6 09 July 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged |
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Hi everyone!
I've always liked learning languages and I'm thrilled to have found an active (!) community of language learners. At the moment learning Swedish is my number one priority. I've studied Swedish in school for six years (+2 courses) but my heart wasn't in it so I didn't learn very much. These days I live in a bilingual city and a lot of jobs require at least decent Swedish skills, so you can imagine I'm kicking myself for not having taken Swedish more seriously at school. My main goal for now is to learn conversational Swedish that I can use in customer service. I'm going to use a book called Flexhandel - Svenska för högskolor, which is a course book for business/economy students. The book is very practical; the units deal with things like sending e-mail and booking a hotel. I'm also going to start reading in Swedish (books, magazines, travel blogs, whiny tumblr posts written by angsty teenagers, the ingredient list on the side of the cereal box), watch TV and movies (any recs?), and start thinking in Swedish at least a bit every day. I'm currently reading a women's magazine and The Da Vinci Code (albeit slowly), and I'm studying unit 1 of the course book. I'll try to go through one unit in one or two weeks, and read one magazine per month. Besides Swedish, I'm also more or less studying English, Japanese and German. I've gotten a little lazy with my English, to be honest. There is so much I still need to work on, including understanding different accents, dialects and slang, writing in a more formal style, translating in general, speaking more fluently, etc. I'm not actively trying to improve my English at the moment, but I did loan the first season of Downton Abbey from the library to see how well I can understand different British accents (and also because it's supposed to be a great show). I study Japanese on and off. Last time I started using an Anki deck to memorize kanji, but I couldn't keep it up. Maybe if I studied like three new kanji every day...? I don't need Japanese in real life at all, so I'm not too worried about my lack of progress. Even my reasons for learning Japanese are very non-serious -see, there's this idol group I like, and I'd very much like to watch their tv-shows without having to rely on fansubs. I've already picked up random words and phrases from their shows (bound to happen after a few hundred hours) but I'd like to eventually understand everything they say. German is very low priority right now. I've studied the basics twice, which amounts to a total of eight years of lessons. I'm really bad at it, though. I sometimes watch an episode of Sturm der Liebe so I wouldn't forget everything completely, but that's it (for now). Edited by dori on 10 July 2012 at 5:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dori Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4516 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Swedish, Japanese | Message 2 of 6 10 July 2012 at 8:05pm | IP Logged |
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I found a top 25 list of the most popular Swedish travel blogs and I picked seven of them to read. Here's the links
in case anyone's interested: annorlunda-spanien.com/index.php/category/artiklar/ articles on Spain, recipies and "annat gått och smått" minhusvagn.com/2009/10/forsta-resan.html the travels of a man and his trailer johannapaues.blogspot.fi a freelance journalist and a mother of a small kid blogs about her life in Berlin lostcyclist.com/resor/virgintour/ the blog of a guy who's spent a total of five years cycling in different parts of the world (links leads to his first tour) bo-i-usa.blogspot.fi the life of an expat Swede in USA blogg.resia.se a blog about traveling in general ettannatnewyork.blogspot.fi a blog about all the little shops and restaurants in New York that can't be found in traditional travel guides Today I've watched short clips of the tv-show Min Morgon and I was happy to discover that I understood easily around 70% of the speech. Except for the interview with Åsa Larsson, that is. Then my understanding dropped down to 50%, which was enough to get the general idea of what they were saying. Of course it's great that I understand Finland Swedish (is that the right term?) better than any other Swedish dialect, but it was still annoying (in a motivating way!). Edited by dori on 10 July 2012 at 8:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 6 10 July 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged |
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Hi, Dori, welcome to the forum! Try this for Swedish audio with transcripts and English translation. Swedish Listening Resources
3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| dori Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4516 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Swedish, Japanese | Message 4 of 6 12 July 2012 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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Hi and thank you for the link! I've listened to the first few of the recordings and it has been helpful in getting a
sense of how real Swedish people talk. It also gave me an opportunity to brush up on how dates work in Swedish, which was excellent. :) I saw a book called En komikers uppväxt being recommended for Swedish learners on another thread. It sounded interesting so I checked if my library had it, and they did! I'm going to go pick up the book and the audio book next week (after I come home from a mini road trip). A few words I've learned this week: frihetsgudinnan - the statue of liberty (or as they say in Sweden, freedom's goddess. interesting!) bröllopstorta - macaron (also interesting!) and one English word: Fistulated cow. I could have lived without ever learning this one. Thanks Radiolab. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dori Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4516 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Swedish, Japanese | Message 5 of 6 26 July 2012 at 7:59am | IP Logged |
Here's what I've been up to since my last update!
I haven't made much progress with the text book and I haven't revised grammar at all. I also haven't started reading/listening to En komiker's uppväxt yet, but I'll get around to it soon enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4820 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 6 of 6 26 July 2012 at 10:40pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Dori,
Good luck with your Swedish. On English however ... .... see if you can borrow or find the original 1981 TV series of "Brideshead Revisited"....the one with Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick, and Anthony Andrews. Real actors, directors, and producers and based on (and very true to) a real novel by Evelyn Waugh. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083390/ 1 person has voted this message useful |
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