Swedish for Beginners

Wow 2 hours in a classroom that was tough.  Not the actual Swedish but just concentrating for 2 hours in that environment.

I am happy with the class though, the teacher Doris is obviously experienced and has a great way of teaching. She quizzed me in Swedish as soon as I got there (10 mins early of course) and she suggested I went into a higher class as this was from scratch. I thanked her for the compliment but explained that had only really learnt Swedish from a book and that I wanted to start from scratch to iron our any bad errors and to cover any basics I have missed out on, or been too lazy to learn.

The class is a mixed bag, its wierd being the only Brit, the others come from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Ireland the US. Most of my classmates are working for Ericsson, thats the technology firm and not Sven Goran!

Doris, the teacher is very good, she refuses to speak English which is good, she does have a sense of humour though, I think we need one as well as she said we need to do 2 hours hemläxa (homework) for each lesson. Lucky I dont have any mates or a social life yet eh!

The classroom was nice, plenty of room, bright and no graffiti, I did laugh though how I instinctively sat at the back of the class, some habits never change!

Although I have so much to learn I was quite happy this morning as I managed to complain about something in Swedish.  My fridge is playing up at the moment so I cant have my usual muesli, because the milk gets frozen. So I thought I would treat myself to a sausage and egg mcmuffin. The woman said it would take tre minuter, three minutes fair enough thinks I. Ten minutes later I am still there so I said,’ det var en lange tre minuter,’ ok I am sure there is a bit of  grammar wrong there but she got the message.  Another lady was also waited and she made a complaint so i said ‘jag trodde det var snabbt mat’ I thought this was fast food which she laughed at.

Made me smile anyway, I think its all about making yourself understood, and complaining in a foreign language is a milestone for any decent Brit. 

I am off to Copenhagen this afternoon, I have a few meetings with clients there and then a few hours at the Ferie 2008 trade fair. I have not been to this one before so will be interesting to see if we can get any good contacts out of it, I am staying Friday night for a night out in Copenhagen which I haven’t done before. I will be posting my thoughts here even though it will be about Denmark.

Todays Swedish Word of the Day is ploggar – which is a slang word for study.