Speak only Swedish + record self for 3 weeks | My language mission and my log | Forum

Native language: English
Other languages: know a little Icelandic
Note to anyone learning: Swedish is very easy in my opinion, you can mess up all the grammar and someone will still understand, and it's really easy to get an in-Swedish explanation that makes sense so you don't always have to revert to English to explain something. Swedes seem to really like bad Swedish (in a good way – I was told "we never hear absolute beginners in Swedish so it's really interesting for us, normally beginners never talk and you don't meet people until after their Swedish is good"). So often I make a mistake and they laugh and explain why it's a mistake, then tell me other ways to say the same thing, it's a very positive criticism and almost every Swede I've met has been like this (only a couple refused to speak any English and didn't talk to me, they were from the Northern Finland-Sweden border and possibly it's just because they were embarrassed about their English).

I've been living in Sweden since June 5th. I live with my Swedish family (the past few months it's been three people including my wife, starting next week it's five people). I had bascially no prior knowledge of Swedish, but Icelandic is a related language so some things are similar. I've haven't studied Swedish from a book/etc. for more than a total of two hours, ideally I would be using an Icelandic textbook to learn Swedish and Wikipedia's nicely-concise grammar charts.

Mission: To speak in only Swedish for three weeks, and to record myself reading in Swedish once per day. (My reading pronunciation is a lot worse than my spoken pronunciation)
Mini goal: To not ever use Icelandic words instead of English words if I can't think of a word (this causes me to rely on Icelandic, and so if I speak to anyone who doesn't know Icelandic then I'll only waste time and confuse them because I'm used to Icelandic being understood by my wife).
Exceptions: Writing briefly online to family/language learners (such as this post), and I can use English words when I don't know how to say it in Swedish.
Time: 15th August to 5th September.
Current Swedish level: lower B (that was my level before I moved to Sweden, at least – I took a real "old exam" but I lost the link to it)

Here was my level in reading Swedish on July 5th: http://plumbroth.tumblr.com/post/26557937163/red-words-i-dont-know-at-all-green-words-i

Blog (but I'll update here in English): http://plumbroth.tumblr.com/
At the end of each seven days I'll compile a video of the stuff I'm recording and post it here. My wife (native Swede) is recording herself reading the same things as me, after I read mine, to show correct pronunciation.

Yesterday was the first day, as our parents are on holiday for a week it's just my wife and I in the house. We've been living abroad (in Iceland) together and spoke English there, and mostly speak English to each other regularly. I only slipped up once at the end of the day and said a couple sentences in English. But my wife (so far, today and yesterday) slips up a LOT more than me and keeps talking to me in English even, because it's easier. But I only got the idea to record myself from a forum post here today (the Greek one), so I don't have a recording for yesterday.

My wife's comments about day one: "i'm really surprised about how much you can actually say in Swedish, you can speak better than you write, your spelling is awful."
I can't study Swedish via book because I'm forming cataracts and get headaches really fast/can't read much, watching tv is also very difficult. But I bought a videogame (arnia: The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe for gameboy advance) to play in Swedish and I can talk to my wife in Swedish too.

My comments so far: Even though my wife wants to help me and she does a great job of it, she seems to be constantly forgetting to talk only in Swedish, so I have to reply/speak to her in it to jostle her memory about it. So far I'm learning a lot, she easily taught me 30+ words/phrases just yesterday. I can understand a lot more than I thought, and it gives you a bit self-confidence boost to know you've managed to make it through the day. I can understand 90% of what she says even though she speaks at a normal speed, but us alone don't speak about so strange/varied topics as all of us as a family do. I know that I can't understand her relatives as easily, and I can't understand dialects from the North/South or accents hardly at all. As a whole family, I probably understand more like 50%.

Raskor said
Sounds like a brilliant idea!

I'll make sure to follow you from time to time to see how you progress. I, as a Swede, also find beginner Swedish interesting

Du skulle skrivar till mig på svenska!! Tack så mycket : P

I live in Uppsala, if anyone reads this and lives close we should meet up (even if you don't want to speak Swedish – I need friends!!)

Day two: Mostly a failure… every time we took even a short break from talking (even if it was interrupted by Swedish – ex. a call on the telephone) my wife forgot to speak in Swedish when we started talking again…. even when I replied in Swedish sometimes… and I also forgot a few times because we didn't even speak so much today as yesterday. I blame the English on starting the day going online and reading some English, and she too was reading English a lot during the day. So I think to do a better job, tomorrow I'll try to stick to reading mostly Swedish online if I go online.

Wife's comments: you have a really heavy foreign accent!

Raskor said
Faktum är att jag bor i Uppsala! Var någonstans i Uppsala bor du?

Jag vet inte, min fru sovar och kan jag inte fråga hon just nu. Vi bor närliggande Sankta Maria kyrkan.
/
Ég veit það ekki! Ég ætla að spyrna konan mín hvenær hún vaknar : P Fyrirgefðu um íslensku mína… Ég skrifa hana ekki oft. Geturðu lesið þessi skilaboð? Við búum nærri "Sankta Maria" kirkjunni.

Day three went a lot better, probably 85% Swedish, and if my wife said stuff in English I would pause and stare at her until she remembered to say it in Swedish (which she remembered a lot faster). Also I made a few Swedish speaking/learning friends over Tumblr and this site that I started talking to (people started messaging me on Tumblr to say hi after I started writing only in Swedish on my tumblr). And I started out the day reading/writing in my bad Swedish online by answering them.

Wife's comments: you need to learn grammar! also the reason why you can't understand us so much as a family is because we make up a lot of words, especially my sisters and me make up words constantly so I'd be surprised if you actually could understand.

Till raskor: Vi bor i "stenhagen"!! : D

Shug said
Hej hej!  Jag lära mig svenska också!  Och du låter riktigt bra.

Anyways, some things I have heard:  To roll your "r", say "butter."  The position of your tongue as you pronounce "tt" in "butter" is the exact place you roll your Rs in.  If you can keep your tongue in this position and attempt at making your mouth/tongue vibrate it might work a little better.  

The /sj/ sound of which you speak:  Think of the english word "hue."  This "hu" sound is pretty similar to the /sj/ sound.  Just move your tongue a little farther back while keeping it in the same position and it should start to work out.  At least, it did for me.  I'm sure Raskor could explain these a little better probably.

Lycka till med din svenska!  Om du vill prata lite, skicka mig en PM. 

Almost six am and woodpeckers are keeping me up, too tired to write in any kind of Swedish that makes sense…
I've been told I have "good intonation" when speaking normally but I think that's just a lie to compliment me on "oh, a foreigner learning Swedish!". I just guess at it. And if I'm at all good at that, it's the only thing in my pronunciation that I¨m good at and intonation isn¨t exactly difficult in Swedish if you hear it constantly every day already… I hardly ever heard Swedish before I moved here three months ago and didn't know anything at all about pronunciation, so I can't possibly be good hahhah

But does that work in all dialects? I, for example, say "buddur" instead of a t sound, so I don't know a natural way to do the tt. It seems all the tt's in my native dialect are either pronounced dd or skipped entirely (I have a similar problem in Icelandic, they say to make a certain sound like "the tl in settle", but I say settle as "seddul" or "seh--el" so…)

"Hue"…I'll try this out later in the day and see if it sounds any closer than my normal attempts, thanks!

I'll try to remember to PM you in a bit after I sleep, I am not usually online, I go on about an hour a day average these days.

Last night I tried learning the sh sound again, my wife did her best to explain it but I can't actually explain it to anyone without taking photos of someone's mouth… but she said "now at least it sounds like the word, even though you're not making the correct sound it's a lot closer than the English sh you do". I'll keep practicing, and once I figure out how to do it I'm going to make some drawings of how it looks inside your mouth for tongue placement and make recordings of the differences in sound and stuff so other people can learn it too.

I get tired really, really fast if I try to make any of these airy sounds like sh (r too). Is that just me? But I thought I saw other English speakers saying the same thing somewhere else and it was because of stuff like "you use too much air each time you try, than a native speaker used to the sound".

Day five: Today was really terrible, I'd say 90% English. But I've learned my lesson. You absolutely can't start out the day using English and think you can recover. If you use English in the morning, for the rest of the day it's semi-okay to use English in your brain, so you rely on it more instead of trying to tackle difficult subjects without it. But if you save the English for later, like the middle of the day, it doesn't affect you that much and you can easily continue in Swedish afterwards (at least that's how my brain apparently works).

But at the end of the day today I wrote a really long message to someone 99% in Swedish, three times the longest I'd written so far. So I think that makes up for it a little. I'm realizing that people actually aren't lying at all when they say they can understand me fine, I mean it can't possibly be that everyone I talk to (even Norwegians and Danes and other learners!) can barely understand me and are just being nice about it…. but it's extremely, extremely surprising. Maybe because I studied Icelandic earlier and it's a lot easier to mess up and confuse meanings and not be understandable in it. And I think my spoken Swedish is still too bad to talk with normal people, it's testing even on my own patience.

Wife's comments: I thought you would have a lot worse written Swedish than spoken/listening until a while after your eye surgery, but it seems like you're learning fast even in written. But I don't know anything about these Swedish exams, I only know about the German ones. (In her German classes at school they had to take the high-level language exams as part of the class, something like that?)

Day seven: 85% Swedish! Suddenly I am able to write on paper again a little bit, so I have started writing a little grammar when my wife teaches it.

Today (22nd August) the other four Swedish family members return home, since I moved two of them haven't been here (but on the upside, those two have worse English so it's even easier to use Swedish with them). Probably there will be a huge amount of things I don't understand starting tomorrow…

Days nine, ten and eleven:

It was staying around 50% Swedish, including reading/writing, but today I've talked probably 70%. Every time I get to practice somehow with another learner I end up talking a lot more in Swedish in the day. So people who send me messages and stuff on here, you're helping me more than you think!! I'm going to try and play videogames in Swedish only, and go back to my idea of "try to read/write only in Swedish until the challenge is over" because I think it also helps me to remember to speak in Swedish. It's more difficult when someone speaks to you in English, because my automatic reaction is to reply fast in English…

My wife's comments: You keep mixing up infinitive and present-tense usage, but other English-native learners do that all the time for some reason too.
My comments: I can't properly remember some words I need to use a lot, like "translate" and "i forget" even though I remember a lot of more obscure words.

After a couple chats and a realization that class registration for spring/summer is coming up, I have a different new goal so I made a new thread here: http://www.fluentin3months.com/forum/my-language-mission/70-swedish-daily-until-new-years-fluent-swedish-before-spring-semester/#p11799