The Swedish Project/Svenska Projekt: 50 Days/Dagar, 15 % Fluency/Flyt

Jag har varit lärande mig några svenska för sju veckor nu, och jag har använde mellan tjugo till trettio minuter per dag sedan starten av den ny år att lära det. Det var en speciell utmaning: eftersom jag ville se om jag kunde lära mig och använda de elementära delarna av ett ny språk inom två månader.

That's enough of that. Hunting for the Alt characters to make these accented letters is becoming bothersome. The translation of what I typed beforehand is this . . .

I have been learning some Swedish for seven weeks now, using 20 to 30 minutes each day* since the start of the new year to learn it. It was a special challenge: because I wanted to see if I could learn and use the elemental parts of a new language within two months.

This is my progress with the first of my self-imposed two month language programs. I have six of them lined up for the year. I tried a 100 day program before, but I was learning slightly skimmed modules of 10 languages at a time, to get a feel for both what I was most proficient at, and what was most challenging for me to understand in terms of grammar and other difficulties. There's not much that can be retained that way. So this time, I'll be diving into one language at a time, for two months at a time, with more intensified focus. Some of you are asking, "Why Swedish exactly?"

I present for you the following reasons:

1. It's one of the closer sibling languages to English -  The real test of this project, before I even selected a language to learn, was to see how competently I could master learning a new language with minimal effort. It's been a while since I made an effort to really learn something new. I'm taking the road to ground zero of language acquisition, since it has been a long time that I practiced any language. I don't want to start with, or have anything to do with, the messiness of extensive verbal conjugations. To sort of gain a sense of my maximum range of my potential, I thought I would put some effort into learning a language that's more similar to English than not. That is, something new (for me), yet loaded with enough common cognates to make it look a bit familiar in certain ways. According to one index I found, Swedish ranks as one of the top nine languages that are easiest for English speakers to acquire. It might not look like it when you compare the two languages from the sample I gave from what I learned to process so far, but English and Swedish are more similar to each other than French is to English, or Spanish compared to English, or even German to English. Even for those who are linguistically challenged people, who are completely talentless at using foreign languages, they might possibly read a Swedish phrase like, "Dessa män här är hungrig." and may be able to deduce correctly that it does indeed mean "These men here are hungry."  Many common words exist between English and Swedish, and the other Nordic/Germanic languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, due to the historical fact that the Vikings invaded the British Isles, and along with the raping and pillaging they did to that land, they impregnated the forming English language itself with a lot of common loan words. English words like they, them, their, egg, shirt, skull, stick, whole, wake, break, sky, skirt, law, and even the word earth, for example, are actually Scandinavian in origin. There are also lots of common words between Swedish and German. For the record, I've found Swedish a lot easier to learn than German. So, Swedish is also going to be helpful in bridging some vocabulary with that other language I already know a bit about, and would like to learn more of in the future.
2. It's multinational - There are only about 10 million speakers of Swedish in the world, but if I wanted to learn one of the languages that's closer to English, I would want to be able to use it in more than just one country when traveling. Norwegian is spoken by a smaller population, plus it's restricted to Norway, and as I understand it, there are so many dialectic deviations and differences even between communities that there are multiple dictionaries in that country for translating one form of Norwegian to another. That sounds too cumbersome and impractical to me. Danish is restricted to Denmark (and some of Greenland: a miserable looking island I wouldn't bother to ever visit anyway). More about Danish later. Icelandic is more archaic, more complex, and limited further still to just having a few hundred thousand native speakers of that language. Then there is also Frisian, which is said to be the living language that's most similar to English (although I can't see it), but it is also almost moving rapidly towards extinction. However though, Swedish is not only used in Sweden; it is also used in Finland (another place I'd visit) by a few hundred thousand more people. Therefore, it's perhaps the more practical of the Scandinavian languages to learn of the languages most closely related to English that I narrowed the choice down to.
3. The several easy things about it - Speaking as an Anglophone, along with the many common words and similar cognates, there are greatly simplified things in the Swedish language that are wonderful. The verbs are great; only one conjugation per tense form across the personal pronouns, quite unlike something as dreadful as a Latin language like Spanish, which has eight different conjugations to memorize for each person form [I, you (singular, informal), you (singular, formal), he/she/it, we, you (plural informal), you (plural, formal), they]. The syntax and grammar are more similar to English than German is. When using numbers, the Swedish ones accord to the way the English ones are used; not like the crazy way the French say quatre-vingt or "four-twenty" to say eighty, or the weird way German places the ones before the tens, as in einundzwanzig or fierundsechszig [one and twenty (21), and four and sixty (64), respectively]. It was one of the factors that eliminated Danish out of the picture also (for now), as I found out that Danish has number counting oddities like those of the other languages I mentioned. There is also in Swedish, different rules for grammatical gender to deal with. In fact, in modern Swedish, there is a movement to introduce a gender pronoun that denotes a person with no specifically known gender. There is the word man (meaning either "man" or more generally "one"), but for some Swedes that word seems to be too biased for the masculine side, and not entirely gender neutral. There is han (he), hon (she), and now hen simply to mean any one man or woman, or to refer to someone whose specific gender isn't known, or for the transgendered. I couldn't say how eagerly that word is being adopted there, perhaps it's even controversial. It would be useful in those awkward "Pat" situations where you can't figure out what the hell someone is supposed to be gender-wise. It's strange, yet true, and perhaps somewhat progressive in some way.
4. More Orthographic Spelling/Pronunciation- Like the blissful thing about German, Spanish, and Ukrainian (once you learn the Cyrillic alphabet), there are relatively fewer anomalies when comparing how the language is spelled and how the words are pronounced in Swedish than in English. Both of Canada's two official languages, English and French, are terrible ones to learn because of too many instances of the lack of concordance between pronunciation and spelling. I also eliminated learning Danish when singling out a language for this project as well because of this same issue in their language: just like English and French, it's polluted with so/too many words with silent letters. There are fewer stupidities in spelling/pronunciation in Swedish than in English, which has crazy things like the eight different pronunciations of words with "-ough" in it. So, I ended up with Swedish as my choice Nordic language to learn.
5. The accent is interesting and beautiful - Forget about the garble you hear from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show, and the "bork bork bork" stuff. The actual rhythm and cadence of the language is quite pleasing to me, plus it's that rhythm that is very helpful in audibly differentiating each of the words, quite unlike for me listening to the horrendous rapid fire staccato output of languages like Spanish or Tagalog, where the sentence sounds like one long word. Plus, Swedish sounds far less guttural (to me) than the other Germanic/Nordic languages, like Dutch**. Perhaps because Swedes seem like a more relatively introverted cultural group, the lack of guttural sounds comes from sounding more low-key, and not being so bold, loud, and boisterous. It sounds like a more intellectual language to me in that respect.  
6. The relatively very few hard things about it - The only trouble I have with its pronunciation is the one unique sound that Swedish has, denoted with the diphthong "sj" which sounds nothing like an s, or a j, or anything else in English, or any other language I heard. The other thing, as I complained about earlier, is the multitude of accented vowels, which unlike the French ones, actually do function 100% of the time, thus they become important to include in correct spelling. Swedish seems to have more vowel sounds than English and necessitates being more of a stickler to correctly pronounce them more so than in English. It makes typing Swedish a pain in the ass with my English keyboard, leaving me to use a hunt and peck method of typing using the Alt key characters. The other thing that throws me off, that's even trickier than the use of other languages' gender specific indefinite articles, is the more arbitrary use of "en" and "ett" (the so-called common gender, and neuter respectively), of which both are more gender non-specific (e.g. both "man", "woman", "boy", and "girl" use the same common "en" gender indefinite article). There is no distinct pattern or system in how to use them that I can recognize, although fluids (water, coffee, tea, beer, oil) seem to favour the neuter "ett" indefinite article. The other tricky thing is changing the noun itself to represent a definite case, in singular and plural form, (e.g. dog = hund, a dog = en hund, dogs = hundar, the dog = hunden, the dogs = hundarna). Along with using some prepositions correctly, those are about the only issues I find really grammatically challenging about the Swedish language.
7. It will serve as a useful cognate database for learning the other tricky Nordic languages - Maybe, if I do travel around someday, I'll get to use Swedish as a bridge language for learning German and those other tricky Nordic languages*** that are supposedly mutually intelligible to each other.   
8. Because I genuinely want to travel to Sweden one day - Therefore, it isn't impractical to learn it. I always feel a certain shame for North Americans in general (less so for Canadians, some of whom are bilingual; more so for Americans) who have so little interest in trying to be bilingual, or multilingual, compared to the Europeans. I hate the lack of consideration by such people failing to learn at least some basic greetings, manners, and polite request phrases, coupled along with this absurd and arrogant expectation by some to automatically be served and accommodated in English when traveling to someone else's nation. I find such behaviour burgeoning on being disrespectful and disgraceful. If you have a capacity to learn and express yourself in at least a few words of a foreign language, by all means, do it!
9. Possible Sanctuary - Sadly, it's also coming to a point where I'm also seriously thinking of places to exile myself to if the political situation on this continent really goes to shit. If Americans are trying to get into Canada because of the Trump situation, where would a Canadian go to if a Trump-like political catastrophe happens here? Certainly not to the US; not for me! The worst case scenario I can think of is Trump somehow getting a second term in the US presidency, and then one of the worst possible candidates for conservative party, up here in Canada, becoming the Prime Minister in 2019 (i.e. Kelly Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary). I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a nation that is becoming more like how America currently is now politically, and if the remaining English speaking nations of the British Commonwealth or Ireland wouldn't have me, or become just as deplorably divided politically and socially as America is now, I would opt to live in a place like Sweden, a country that tops a lot of the social wellness indices and scales, along with the other Nordic nations***.

So far, throughout my study of the language, my list of favourite/interesting Swedish words I discovered through my linguistic tour of it is as thus:

1. Lagom - the Goldielocks word which concisely means "not too much; not too little, but just enough. It is a unique word to Swedish. I already mentioned it in a past post.
2. Orkar - A verb (present tense here) that means roughly "to have enough energy to do something". Example: Jag orkar inte jobba i dag. Jag känns sjuk! Translation: I don't have the energy to work today. I feel sick! I myself personally would be applying this verb in the negative to mostly housecleaning, anticipating encounters with drama queens, doing my taxes, and, of course, hangovers.****
3. Samboskap - With so many Swedes opting not to live as married couples, this word summarizes a common-law household living arrangement.
4. Fika - a nice little word that's used as both a noun and a verb for "to break for coffee and snacks"
5. Dog - It simply means "died" in Swedish. It leaves me to wonder if the Swedes listening to the song Hound Dog are perplexed as to why Elvis is singing so merrily about his dog dying.
6. På - Sort of pronounced like "paw". It's like the Swiss Army knife of prepositions, mostly meaning "on", but I notice in some cases that it can be substituted for the English equivalents of "in", "at", "with", and  "by". When I get confused while running through the online test quizzes about which preposition to use, I can whip out på and have about a 63% chance of having it be correct or acceptable.
7. Klockan - it literally means "the clock", but it's also a conveniently simple way to express hourly time. Just as we say "It's six o'clock.", to say the same thing in Swedish you'd say "Det är klockan sex." Incidentally, sex is both the word for six and sex in Swedish, and it leads me to wonder if Swedes habitually have sex at six o'clock. Man kan alltid hoppas att hitta det för sig själv (One can always hope to find that out for oneself).
8. Sjuk - If you didn't figure it out already from the example in point 2, it means "sick". However, with the ghastly, God-awful sounding, unique phoneme this language has for the "sj-" pairing, combined with the "Ook" sound from the "-uk", this word becomes a perfect piece of disgusting onomatopoeia for sounding like you are genuinely becoming sick: like you're trying to stifle yourself from puking on your shoes.
9. Varandra - A much more lovely word than "sjuk", that's for sure. It's a nice, concise, almost poetic, word that means "each other". It flows so smoothly and nicely in a sentence like Vi älskar varandra (We love each other). Awwwwww . . .
10. Jävla Jävel! - I was going to reserve spot number ten to include the foulest, rankest piece of profanity I could dig up from this language, but honestly I think I failed. When I sound out these two words together, they sound too lyrical and musical in my English thinking mind to be even considered nasty and offensive words. If someone yelled this at me, I wouldn't even flinch at all. However, read or said together, they roughly mean "fucking son of a bitch!"  

Exercising the mental task of acquiring another language is one of the most beneficial, enriching, practical, and not to mention cheaper things one can do to improve the brain's physiological health, and to prevent it from aging too rapidly and harshly. The injury I had last year, plus the trauma my lungs and heart took the time before that has made me wary that my work life has to probably veer away from physical labour to doing more cerebral stuff, so it's even more important to keep my wiring in check. It's to retest my mentally ability to adopt and adapt to things. It's also one of those great and cool Jason Bourne type skills to add to one's repertoire. Most other foreign languages intrigue me, and I am very envious of people who are genuinely talented polyglots. It's not just learning another language to me, it's gaining another world perspective and seeing what is enhanced or diminished with the addition and boundaries of another foreign vocabulary. Combining this, with more math skills and logic exercises gives me more of a clearer avenue to test out machine language programming and coding later on. I'll see and hope that my interest in this doesn't wane. As for now, I've applied it to playing against native Swedish speakers in Trivia Crack (. . . and beating some of them to at 6-0, hehehehe).

*-Finding 20 to 30 minutes a day to commit to a project like this is easy once you consciously start breaking the negative habits of watching junk TV and avoiding depressing news, avoiding toxic people, and dropping using other apps that aren't productive.

**- Dutch has some similarities to English, at least that I can see in written form, but it sure isn't pleasing to listen to with my ears. No offense intended to the Dutch; I'm sure there are some practicalities and nice and sensible inherent qualities about the language, but for me, it's like listening to someone talk while they are struggling to swallow a mouthful of live cockroaches. Afrikaans, being closely related to both Dutch and English, sounds just about as weird, and is further impractical for me to learn because South Africa isn't a place where I'd care to visit. Please note that I'm not touting English as a superior language. I get that it has lots of flaws and deficits.

***- I have Danish friends, and I don't want to demean their mother tongue, but I'm simply working at this project empirically. I simply find that between listening to and reading samples of both languages, Swedish is the one that is more comprehensible to me. It's so strange how a phrase translated into both languages, which in my eye have close to identical spellings in some cases, can yet sound so radically unlike each other. Sorry Danes; it's not you, it's me. I've even committed to trying to follow episodes of Dicte on Netflix, to study spoken Danish a bit, and I find your language far less inferable or intelligible than Swedish is (otherwise, it is a good show once you slap in the subtitles). It sounds more mumbled or slurred than Swedish does to my Anglo-Canadian brain/ears. Both are probably loaded equally with their own unique idiosyncrasies that I have yet to learn more about. I'm certainly not perfect linguistically, and I'd probably butcher the pronunciation badly of either of them, no matter which one of the two I dare myself to speak. Regarding point 9, I'd eagerly move to Denmark too were it not for the fact that the language is much more challenging.

****- I thought I should add an example reply (past participle): Med än, du hade orkat att dricka en hela flask av Absolut vodka i kväll går! Så, hur kan jag vara ledsen för dig? Komma, låt oss gå fika. Translation: But yet, you had managed to have the energy to drink a whole bottle of Absolut vodka last night! How can I feel sorry for you? Come on, let's go grab some coffee.