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Some thoughts on language learning
Aug. 4th, 2021 06:43 pmI'd been thinking vaguely for a while that I'd like to try learning another language properly. Swedish seemed a good idea partly because I've been into Swedish books and music lately, partly because it's fairly closely related to English (twice, actually) and the similarities might make it easier to learn than a completely unrelated language and partly because I want to visit Sweden and do lots of birdwatching in the future.
So I've been doing lessons on Duolingo, supplemented with some very helpful Youtube videos on pronunciation (I can now understand things like 'voiceless velar fricative', which feels very impressively technical)—and I've now got myself a dictionary and reference grammar, which looks like it'll be very useful for sorting out all those verb types and so on. (Duolingo is good for practising vocabulary but its grammatical explanations are fairly basic). Folk songs are also very good for making vocabulary memorable, especially the more repetitive ones—I've learnt all the words in this very simple song, and am working on more ballads.
(I've also set up my keyboard to type in Swedish, which makes it easier to do this öäå but also moves all the punctuation around, which is slightly confusing—I'm developing a second muscle memory to remember where everything is).
That thought about similarity is true so far—a lot of basic Swedish vocabulary is very similar to English (katt/cat, hus/house, gå/go and so on)—and, interestingly, of course for historical reasons, it's especially similar to northern English, and also Scots. I'm finding a lot of geographical terms and other northern dialect/Scots words, which lead to terribly interesting etymological investigations—so e.g. dal/dale(/valley), gråta/greet(/cry), barn/bairn(/child), vilka/whilk(/which)... as Horrible Histories memorably put it, thank a Viking!
But the differences are also interesting, and I'm enjoying learning some neat grammatical features that English doesn't have. So e.g. instead of having a word for 'the', Swedish nouns add a suffix to become definite (en katt, a cat; katten, the cat), which I think is quite elegant, and which also makes learning noun genders easier because the suffixes are different. Swedish also still has the singular/plural 'you' distinction which has been lost in English (the singular, du, is I think related to 'thou'), which is very useful!
Obviously it will be good to learn more Swedish ballads in the future, and read books, etc. (I read some of Astrid Lindgren's books in English as a child, and I think they'll be nice to revisit when I get to that stage). I'm not sure how good my speaking skills will ever get—being autistic, speaking isn't always the easiest in English—but hey, it's an experiment, we shall see.
So I've been doing lessons on Duolingo, supplemented with some very helpful Youtube videos on pronunciation (I can now understand things like 'voiceless velar fricative', which feels very impressively technical)—and I've now got myself a dictionary and reference grammar, which looks like it'll be very useful for sorting out all those verb types and so on. (Duolingo is good for practising vocabulary but its grammatical explanations are fairly basic). Folk songs are also very good for making vocabulary memorable, especially the more repetitive ones—I've learnt all the words in this very simple song, and am working on more ballads.
(I've also set up my keyboard to type in Swedish, which makes it easier to do this öäå but also moves all the punctuation around, which is slightly confusing—I'm developing a second muscle memory to remember where everything is).
That thought about similarity is true so far—a lot of basic Swedish vocabulary is very similar to English (katt/cat, hus/house, gå/go and so on)—and, interestingly, of course for historical reasons, it's especially similar to northern English, and also Scots. I'm finding a lot of geographical terms and other northern dialect/Scots words, which lead to terribly interesting etymological investigations—so e.g. dal/dale(/valley), gråta/greet(/cry), barn/bairn(/child), vilka/whilk(/which)... as Horrible Histories memorably put it, thank a Viking!
But the differences are also interesting, and I'm enjoying learning some neat grammatical features that English doesn't have. So e.g. instead of having a word for 'the', Swedish nouns add a suffix to become definite (en katt, a cat; katten, the cat), which I think is quite elegant, and which also makes learning noun genders easier because the suffixes are different. Swedish also still has the singular/plural 'you' distinction which has been lost in English (the singular, du, is I think related to 'thou'), which is very useful!
Obviously it will be good to learn more Swedish ballads in the future, and read books, etc. (I read some of Astrid Lindgren's books in English as a child, and I think they'll be nice to revisit when I get to that stage). I'm not sure how good my speaking skills will ever get—being autistic, speaking isn't always the easiest in English—but hey, it's an experiment, we shall see.
