Realignment

[marshtide]

This is one of those wretched days during which nothing significantly bad has happened but which one feels awful about anyway. Basically, a giant crisis of self-worth. Realistically, putting together an essay of any sort wasn't going to happen and I couldn't think of anything held in reserve, though there must be stuff somewhere around here...

But we're talking about our own awesomeness today, apparently. Nothing could be more contrary to how I feel about myself right now, which is probably the best possible argument for taking a shot at it, as recommended by annotated_em. This is actually enough of a problem for me that my first response is along the lines of, wait, what am I good at? What can I do? Nothing! & that I'm still struggling to move beyond that stage.

But let's try.


- I'm kicking arse at Swedish. I've gone from a handful of words and a few stock phrases in February (e.g. "Kan jag få en kopp te, tack" and "vill du har lite te?", because this is actually genuinely what our lives revolve around - go on, guess) to being able to carry out simple conversations and understand rather more complex ones. I've watched several films in Swedish and followed the plot and I've read a whole bunch of children's books. And you know what's even more awesome about this? I'm not being formally taught yet. This is how far I've got before I've had a single lesson. Jag är jättebra, faktiskt.

- I make pretty amazing chocolate brownies. At my previous workplace they were the stuff of office legend, and useable as bribes.

- My writing has a distinctive voice which feels like it's mine, and I'm proud of the degree to which I can convey mood and a sense of place. Right now I feel like my writing is really anchored in landscapes that are important to me and that it draws a lot from that, and I like that.


Well. I guess that didn't kill me.

Who'd have thought.

Comments

[jetsam]

Picking up a language without being taught is indeed pretty awesome.

[marshtide]

I start classes in a couple of weeks and that'll hopefully really set things firmly in place and make sure I practice the bits that I tend to get lazy about, but I'm honestly thrilled with how far I've come by myself. When I arrived I felt like I'd never have the confidence to say single words in Swedish, and now I can have innane conversations about birds or what to have for dinner or the weather. This week I wrote our entire shopping list in Swedish and only had to check a couple of things! I've also stopped caring so much about being precisely right and started caring more about finding a way to get meaning across, which I think is exactly the right way to go at this stage of learning, when it's most important that I just use what I have again and again and again.

:D

[jetsam]

A long way and fast, by the sound of it. Getting your meaning across is probably by far the most important thing - you can always anchor the grammar later.

I hope the classes go well too :)

[marshtide]

It's an especially big step for me because, well, you know how I can be a perfectionist to an utterly self-defeating degree. Saying a sentence and not worrying too much about whether I actually used the right plural form for a word is not a small step for me. *wry* But! I do it!

(Plural forms! Swedish has seven of them! Did I mention this? Seven!)

[unnique]

You are indeed awesome! And there's the topinc for another post: Sweden's seven plurals! :D

[marshtide]

The bastards. The book I have tries to tell me there are rules for which words take what plural form, but when there are like fifteen possible criteria for each plus a list of twenty exceptions just from the sort of basic vocab that kind of book expects oen to pick up I freely admit that I roll my eyes and go, fuck it, I'll learn them word by word as I go.

[marshtide]

(...on the other hand, have I mentioned how much I miss being able to edit comments for my hideous spelling?)

[annotated_em]

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to play with the new points system. :3

[marshtide]

I flail in your general direction. Lovingly, I mean. Thank you. ;;

[annotated_em]

I am in so much awe of your language acquisition skills! They are awesome and formidable indeed. *sparkles at you*

And I love your writing: you're absolutely right; you do an amazing job of evoking mood that I'm supremely envious of.

[marshtide]

I really never thought I could manage so much like this. I have limited vocabulary but there is a fundamental level on which the language has begun to feel that it Makes Sense. I'm not sure I can explain what I mean better than that. Maybe that when I hear a word I don't know I hear, well, a word I don't know, when before I wouldn't really have heard a word so much as a sound. There's learning rules and memorising words and I've been doing my share of that, but then there's the way things either click or fail to click, and basically, something has clicked.

*sparkle sparkle* :)

[branchandroot]

Learning a language by immersion is incredibly awesome.

And fantastic chocolate brownies make the whole /world/ a better place.

[marshtide]

:)

And they seriously do. What would we do without them?

[love_archived]

Wow. You did in four months what has taken me four years. O_o

[marshtide]

In absolute fairness I'm having a very different immigration experience. I'm living with two native Swedish speakers, the four other people here I know fairly well are all native speakers too, and I'm not working, specifically so that I can give more energy to learning Swedish. (As discussed before I moved here there are certainly things I could be doing, from proof-reading translations to writing articles for magazines to giving English-language tours of local archaeological sites, but for now I've opted not to and am trusting that intensive language study leading to fluency will look impressive enough when I'm telling people what I've been up to.)