Language learning progress
Apr. 18th, 2022 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI have recently completed the Swedish language tree (det svenska trädet, as one of the final exercises reminds me) on Duolingo! This is an accomplishment, and I feel quite pleased with myself. I can do the pluperfect and sometimes even the subjunctive and I know lots of bird names and other words.
As for what I'm doing next, Duolingo has various additional bits—practice exercises of the vocabulary and grammar already introduced—which I'm still working through, and then I'm reading and watching/listening to things and trying to improve my vocabulary, a slow process. I am still a very long way from actual fluency, but I am definitely improving—reading a not-too-complicated story, I can usually get the basic sense of a paragraph on the first try, and find myself looking words up more to check their precise meaning than to figure out the basics of what's going on at all. Listening is harder—currently my comprehension of simple sentences with familiar words is at the level of English when my auditory processing is playing up, and I still get lost with anything much more complicated, but again my ability to follow the general sense of things is improving.
(I'm also starting to be able to recognise the features of different Swedish accents, which is kind of fun—although I still have very little idea which is which!).
At the moment I'm watching a documentary series on SVT about Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden, and the people who live and work around it—a lot of beautiful scenery and fascinating stories, and I'm really enjoying it. I recently came across a seasonal rec for a Swedish version of Jesus Christ Superstar and have been listening to a few of the songs today—this looks like great fun, and I think I'll watch the whole thing sometime.
At some point I will try to acquire an actual book (a children's book with fairly simple language, I think, possibly something by Astrid Lindgren) and start reading and just see how it goes. I probably can read quite a lot faster than I actually am reading at the moment, since I don't need to look words up and make notes as much as I do to make sure of things, so it's difficult to know exactly how far from being able to do that I am. Perhaps I shall just plunge in at some point.
As for what I'm doing next, Duolingo has various additional bits—practice exercises of the vocabulary and grammar already introduced—which I'm still working through, and then I'm reading and watching/listening to things and trying to improve my vocabulary, a slow process. I am still a very long way from actual fluency, but I am definitely improving—reading a not-too-complicated story, I can usually get the basic sense of a paragraph on the first try, and find myself looking words up more to check their precise meaning than to figure out the basics of what's going on at all. Listening is harder—currently my comprehension of simple sentences with familiar words is at the level of English when my auditory processing is playing up, and I still get lost with anything much more complicated, but again my ability to follow the general sense of things is improving.
(I'm also starting to be able to recognise the features of different Swedish accents, which is kind of fun—although I still have very little idea which is which!).
At the moment I'm watching a documentary series on SVT about Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden, and the people who live and work around it—a lot of beautiful scenery and fascinating stories, and I'm really enjoying it. I recently came across a seasonal rec for a Swedish version of Jesus Christ Superstar and have been listening to a few of the songs today—this looks like great fun, and I think I'll watch the whole thing sometime.
At some point I will try to acquire an actual book (a children's book with fairly simple language, I think, possibly something by Astrid Lindgren) and start reading and just see how it goes. I probably can read quite a lot faster than I actually am reading at the moment, since I don't need to look words up and make notes as much as I do to make sure of things, so it's difficult to know exactly how far from being able to do that I am. Perhaps I shall just plunge in at some point.
