Is how long it took to listen my way through the audio book Stolthet och fördom whilst following along in the Kindle version. Sadly, the two editions aren't the same, which meant sometimes the audio version skipped several paragraph of text and other times spoke quite a bit before I could find a place where the spoken words matched what was on my ( Read more... )

Very soon after moving to Sweden they explained to me that in Swedish vowels are either long or short, depending on if they are next to a single or double consonant. For example: väg (road) vs vägg (wall). This is a concept I have had problems with ever since. In part because I don't really hear much difference between them, and in part because I ( Read more... )

I don't know why it occurred to me, but sometime late on Saturday night/early Sunday morning I suddenly wondered if it would be possible to spend a day not speaking English. So I mentioned the thought to lord_kjar (in Swedish, of course), and after we chatted about it for a bit, I decided to go for it for all of Sunday, since it was only just after ( Read more... )

One of my collegues has suggested a number of edits to the Swedish Language version of the summary of my research. Anyone who wishes to compare the before and after are welcome to do so here. before and ( after )

Yesterday was the final exam for the Swedish class I have been taking. I was not as prepared for it as I might have been, since I wound up missing a fair few class meetings due to travel this term, but it mostly went ok anyway. I did have problems with one section, which was meant to be testing us on our abilities to use the correct reflexive or ( Read more... )

mat = food
matt = weak/feeble
mätt = full/satisfied
mät = measurement

Look at that list of words. Notice how similar they are? The difference in sound between "mat" and "matt" is naught more than the length of time the vowel is pronounced. The difference between "mat" and "mät" is only a subtle change in the type of "a" sound made. In ( Read more... )