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3 years to Swedish fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| snoogles Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5825 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English, French*, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 1 of 29 22 June 2008 at 9:04pm | IP Logged |
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I've just come back from a lovely month-long trip to Sweden where I coasted in English and where the only words I really learned were "tack", "hey", and "nästa station". That fills me with shame, especially now that I realize how much I enjoyed Stockholm. I think that I might have a little bit of a city-crush on it, and I'm definitely planning on going back there, hopefully to live for at least a year.
So here's the deal: I want to be good enough at Swedish that I can take university level science courses in it within 3 years. This includes 2 years of independent study and 1 year of immersion. This is the first time that I've done something like this. I learned my Spanish almost completely through immersion, and it was similar enough to French that it was quite easy. This is my first post to this forum, but I've been lurking for a while now, and I think that just forcing myself to post hopefully frequent updates here will help motivate me when the initial rush of excitement wears off. The Plan I've already done the Pimsleur Compact lessons. They gave me a good grounding in pronunciation and a little boost of confidence. Vocabulary is easy to memorize when each word is given to you 100 times! I'd like to go through all 16 of the FSI lessons, one per week until I'm done, putting the dialogues in an SRS and reviewing them every day. At the same time, I'll try to locate a copy of Assimil's "Le Suédois sans peine" and do one lesson every day. Does that sound like too much? I have this summer to establish a good steady routine and let it become second nature. Perhaps some of you will have suggestions on how to make the whole process go smoothly... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| polikaru Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5967 days ago 206 posts - 215 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Dutch | Message 2 of 29 23 June 2008 at 2:05am | IP Logged |
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This is interesting, thanks for sharing. Good luck.
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| snoogles Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5825 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English, French*, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 3 of 29 24 June 2008 at 8:34pm | IP Logged |
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Today is a "national " holidy here in Quebec City, Canada, so I took advantage by spending the whole day exploring the best way to use FSI. Verdict? FSI seems like it's going to be very helpful for learning grammar, but I don't learn vocabulary well when it's thrown at me in a dialogue, 50 terms at a time. (I might be exagerating, but barely.) I try to listen to the dialogue, and I can understand more or less when I'm reading it, but half of the words seem to get swallowed up in speech. Of course, that's natural, but it makes it hard to develop the initial reading comprehension you need to get a footing in the language. That's what I liked about Pimsleur: those 10 lessons slooowly took you through conversations, one word at a time. If only they'd developed their Swedish method more...
I ended up trying the Rosetta Stone method, and just rushed through about a unit and a half. The first half-dozen, I just did the initial exercise (you get a word both spoken and written and have to find the matching picture.) Now that the lessons are a little more complicated, I try to do that first one, as well as two others. One shows you a picture and has you listen for the correct answer, and the other shows you a picture, says a sentence, and has you write it. It'll be interesting to see how much of this vocabulary I remember tomorrow, but it seems like I've learned a lot of words in a fairly short amount of time, and I'm having fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| snoogles Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5825 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English, French*, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 4 of 29 02 July 2008 at 5:08pm | IP Logged |
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I've finally been able to buy Assimil! I went through a couple of lessons this weekend, and I really like it. However, the recording for the first few lessons is veeerrrryyy slow. Painfully so. Hopefully it will start to pick up speed soon. The pacing of the lessons, on the other hand, seems excellent. Coupled with a daily Rosetta Stone lesson, I am starting to recognize more and more vocabulary. All the Assimil lessons are going into my SRS and the review is easy to do every day.
FSI is looking less and less appealing every day. I think that I'm just going to let it go for a few weeks and see if my listening comprehension improves before I look at it again. On another topic, I visited a fantastic bookstore in Montreal which sells only language books! I was with family so I didn't stay long but it looked fantastic. I picked up "Le Suedois sans Peine" and two Spanish books (short stories by Isabel Allende and I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez). One is bilingual, with Spanish facing French, and the other has text on one page and notes (in Spanish) on the other. I'll start reading them for fun as soon as I'm done with my current novel, but I'm excited to make Spanish a language that I can read for pleasure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6728 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 29 02 July 2008 at 6:23pm | IP Logged |
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Glad that you found "Le Suedois sans peine"! I've learned a lot from my Assimil courses, and you will most likely find that the speakers speed up after the 14th lesson (that's my experience), if not sooner.
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| snoogles Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5825 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English, French*, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 6 of 29 12 July 2008 at 8:34pm | IP Logged |
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I'm finding Rosetta Stone to be extremely helpful, and the dictation exercises particularly so. I'm on unit 4, lesson 2 right now, and I already have a very good sense of spelling in Swedish. While it's not as obviously phonetic as Spanish, the logic is very much there. It's mostly a matter of remembering which words are not pronounced in their entirety, or even completely differently (jag, de, etc...).
Another good thing is that the less basic vocabulary in the Assimil lessons (like wall and painting) is often a word which I already recognize from a previous RS lesson! All in all, the two courses work well together. Pronunciation is a little iffy, expecially the sound of "sju". So far I've been approximating with a "sh" type sound, but I realize that it's not quite there and needs some work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Eduard Decaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5844 days ago 166 posts - 170 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Dutch*, NorwegianC1, Swedish, Danish, English, German, ItalianB1, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, French Studies: Portuguese | Message 7 of 29 13 July 2008 at 4:06am | IP Logged |
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Swedish isn't quite so difficult to learn, and it's nice too. I think you won't be needing such a long time to speak good Swedish, but it's better to overestimate the time you'll need.
I can only recommend to listen to Swedish radio every single minute you're behind your pc. Check http://www.svt.se/ for radio streams and television programmes (Play). And indeed, the 'sh' sound is a bit odd, but it is not pronounced that way all over Sweden. Anyway, you'll learn it soon. Put up some soundbites of your pronunciation as you're progressing, it'd be interresting to be able to check on your improvements :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emerald Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom languagedabbler.blog Joined 6064 days ago 316 posts - 340 votes Speaks: Hindi, Gujarati*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 29 13 July 2008 at 6:23am | IP Logged |
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I think your plan is very good, and achievable. You also seem to have found what methods work for you, so that could only be a benefit.
I would send Eduart's suggestion about listening/watching swedish items, as "real time" speech would especially help your listening skills for everyday swedish. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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