Advice for Americans moving to Sweden; what worked for me and what I wish I had known sooner
My sister, A, just sent me a facebook introduction to some friends of hers who have moved to Sweden from the US, and suggested that we chat about being an American in Sweden. I promptly thought of lots of things I wanted to say, and then realized that it wouldn’t be polite to do an info dump into a FB chat window, so I thought I would type it all here and just give them a link instead. (L & H, if you happen to have an LJ account leave me a comment here; otherwise I will see you over on FB.)
This is all written with the assumption that you actually want to learn Swedish. If you happen to be one of those people with no interest in learning another language you have come to the right place-nearly everyone in Sweden between 15 and 50 (an many more older and younger than that) is fluent in English, so you can get by without ever learning more than “tack”, “hejdå”, and “precis” and you needn’t bother reading further.
My sister tells me that you are an avid reader; I am too, and I think this was the thing that helped me the most when I moved to Sweden. When I arrived I decided that I wasn’t going to read fiction in English, only in Sweden, and I got my hands on Swedish translations of books I had read many times before in English. By reading books I knew and loved I was free to just read without having to bother with a dictionary to look words up, since I knew what the words had to mean before I read them. (Ok, sometimes I had to look things up, but it was like once or twice a chapter rather than several times a paragraph like it was when reading things in the Swedish textbook.) After reading a few old favourite books I started adding Swedish children’s books into the mix, and found that my vocabulary was already up for the job.
My written vocabulary. It actually took me several years before I could listen to a conversation in Swedish and follow most of it. Why? Because all of the words I knew and understood to look at turn out to have a drastically different pronunciation than I expected from the letters in them. What I am doing now, and what I wish I had started doing years ago is to listen to audio books at the same time as I read the text. Why didn’t I start this sooner? Because I have never cared for audio books-I grew up with a hearing problem, and depend on reading lips to help supplement the sounds I hear when people speak, and even then I don’t always catch what is said. I don’t listen to audio books in English if there is any way to avoid it (besides, human speech is so slow! I could read three English books in the time it would take to listen to one being read out loud). However, I find that I am enjoying listening and reading the text at the same time, and it has made a huge difference in my own ability to pronounce things in Swedish, and in my ability to recognize words when I hear them in conversation.
The other thing I wish I had known from the beginning is the difference between the “svensk för nybörjar” class offered at the local university, which is aimed at exchange students, and the “svensk för invandringar” class offered by the government. I took the former soon after I arrived, because it was easy to find out when and where it met and how to sign up for it. I had problems finding info for the sfi course, so didn’t bother. Until, after three years of living here, when I finally had enough Swedish to carry on a reasonable conversation one-on-one, but still had major problems following rapid Swedish conversations between a bunch of native speakers, when I asked a friend who has been living here 15 years how long it had taken him to get to the point where he could follow conversations in Swedish. “Six months.” I expressed my shock and disbelief, and he replied that the sfi course meets four hours a day, so of course one gets there quickly. My Swedish for beginners course had met only 2 hours a week, and I only took the first year before I was traveling too much for work to be able to continue. Therefore I tried again and this time found out how to enrol in sfi, and managed to do well enough on the entrance exam (which, of course, is primarily reading/writing, which is my strength) to get placed in the highest level class. That was in February, and since then I have made huge progress on my ability to speak and understand spoken Swedish (and I started that whole audio book while reading thing). I have just left day one of the national exam to be done with the Swedish for immigrants course, and think I did fine on it (was done with the reading part in 30 minutes of the 80 allotted, and only had to guess on some of the questions for the hearing part).
My other advice is to sing songs in Swedish! Join a choir or other singing group, or just click on my "learn Swedish one song at a time" button in the list of tags on the right side of this page and you can learn the songs I have worked on in the past several years (or at least the ones I took the time to post here).
I hope you like living in Sweden as much as I have; it is a delightful place to live.
This is all written with the assumption that you actually want to learn Swedish. If you happen to be one of those people with no interest in learning another language you have come to the right place-nearly everyone in Sweden between 15 and 50 (an many more older and younger than that) is fluent in English, so you can get by without ever learning more than “tack”, “hejdå”, and “precis” and you needn’t bother reading further.
My sister tells me that you are an avid reader; I am too, and I think this was the thing that helped me the most when I moved to Sweden. When I arrived I decided that I wasn’t going to read fiction in English, only in Sweden, and I got my hands on Swedish translations of books I had read many times before in English. By reading books I knew and loved I was free to just read without having to bother with a dictionary to look words up, since I knew what the words had to mean before I read them. (Ok, sometimes I had to look things up, but it was like once or twice a chapter rather than several times a paragraph like it was when reading things in the Swedish textbook.) After reading a few old favourite books I started adding Swedish children’s books into the mix, and found that my vocabulary was already up for the job.
My written vocabulary. It actually took me several years before I could listen to a conversation in Swedish and follow most of it. Why? Because all of the words I knew and understood to look at turn out to have a drastically different pronunciation than I expected from the letters in them. What I am doing now, and what I wish I had started doing years ago is to listen to audio books at the same time as I read the text. Why didn’t I start this sooner? Because I have never cared for audio books-I grew up with a hearing problem, and depend on reading lips to help supplement the sounds I hear when people speak, and even then I don’t always catch what is said. I don’t listen to audio books in English if there is any way to avoid it (besides, human speech is so slow! I could read three English books in the time it would take to listen to one being read out loud). However, I find that I am enjoying listening and reading the text at the same time, and it has made a huge difference in my own ability to pronounce things in Swedish, and in my ability to recognize words when I hear them in conversation.
The other thing I wish I had known from the beginning is the difference between the “svensk för nybörjar” class offered at the local university, which is aimed at exchange students, and the “svensk för invandringar” class offered by the government. I took the former soon after I arrived, because it was easy to find out when and where it met and how to sign up for it. I had problems finding info for the sfi course, so didn’t bother. Until, after three years of living here, when I finally had enough Swedish to carry on a reasonable conversation one-on-one, but still had major problems following rapid Swedish conversations between a bunch of native speakers, when I asked a friend who has been living here 15 years how long it had taken him to get to the point where he could follow conversations in Swedish. “Six months.” I expressed my shock and disbelief, and he replied that the sfi course meets four hours a day, so of course one gets there quickly. My Swedish for beginners course had met only 2 hours a week, and I only took the first year before I was traveling too much for work to be able to continue. Therefore I tried again and this time found out how to enrol in sfi, and managed to do well enough on the entrance exam (which, of course, is primarily reading/writing, which is my strength) to get placed in the highest level class. That was in February, and since then I have made huge progress on my ability to speak and understand spoken Swedish (and I started that whole audio book while reading thing). I have just left day one of the national exam to be done with the Swedish for immigrants course, and think I did fine on it (was done with the reading part in 30 minutes of the 80 allotted, and only had to guess on some of the questions for the hearing part).
My other advice is to sing songs in Swedish! Join a choir or other singing group, or just click on my "learn Swedish one song at a time" button in the list of tags on the right side of this page and you can learn the songs I have worked on in the past several years (or at least the ones I took the time to post here).
I hope you like living in Sweden as much as I have; it is a delightful place to live.