Learning Swedish: Online Resources

Here is part two of my series about learning Swedish. You can find part one: Swedish classes in Sweden here.

Here are some online Swedish language resources I have found useful:

Klartext: Basically the Swedish news, but simplified to make it easier for us Swedish learners to understand and not become distracted/bored after 1 minute by more exciting shiny things around us. Each report is 10 minutes long and they arrive Monday to Friday, which means 50 minutes a week of Swedish listening practice that is actually useful. I wouldn’t say it is exactly easy, especially for a beginner, but it is certianly much easier to understand than the normal news, as they speak quite clearly and slowly. You can also download the episodes in the podcast section of iTunes as well.

Björn Engdahl’s Swedish Course: A short course giving you a good overview of the basics of Swedish grammar as well as some verb tables.

8 Sidor: Swedish news written very simply. A good starting point before hitting normal newspapers. You can pay for the full version to be delivered to you.

Dagens Nyheter: Speaking of which, this is one of Sweden’s most popular newspapers. Try this for practice once you have studied Swedish for awhile. I find it better to print the articles with added spacing between lines and read them away from the computer so that I don’t get distracted/I can write translations where needed.

Try the GoSwedish YouTube channel for some very funny Swedish lessons.

FSI Swedish: An oldie, but a goodie.

Not a language learning resources as such, but this is the best online Swedish-English dictionary I have come across: Tyda

If you are in Sweden, you can watch Swedish TV shows here: SVT

For Swedish, and language learning in general:

LingQ is especially good for reading practice.

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Learning Swedish: Swedish classes in Sweden

This is part one of my series in learning the Swedish language – Swedish classes in Sweden

SFI: Svenskundervisning för invandrare or Swedish for Immigrants

SFI is run by the Swedish government and is free. You are able to take the course if you have a Swedish person number and a residency permit. SFI offers daytime courses of between 15 to 20 hours a week and night courses of 6 hours a week. The night classes seem to be broken into 2 x 3 hours after work.

I have no personal experience with this course, and have heard mixed reviews from friends. Most have said the classes are well organised and taught however a few have likened their SFI experience to that of a circus. Still, considering the fact that it is free, I think it is worth signing up and hoping for the best.  Class sizes are bigger than in the paid classes, which is to be expected, and SFI is offered throughout Sweden.

If you live in Stockholm, you can take the test at the SFI centre at Hornsgatan 124 (Zinkensdamm T-Bana):

Monday, Tuesday and Thursday at 10:30 am to 2:30 pm
Wednesday at 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Swedish for Academics (you can read about my experiences with SFEJ here)

The Swedish for academics course, and those for trained professionals are also offered by the government for free, and are around 30 hours of study per week. Classes are broken down by specialty, and a university degree, and for some reason, minimum English language are required for many of these courses. This is ideal for someone who can spare the 30 hours a week necessary to attend class, with presumably 10 hours or so of homework per week on top of that.

This course is broken down into:

Swedish for Educators (SFP)

Swedish for Engineers (SFINX)

Swedish for Economists, Lawyers, Social, Human Resources and Systems Specialists (SFEJ)

Swedish for Qualified Healthcare Workers (nurses, doctors, veterinarians, etc)

Swedish for Entrepreneurs

Swedish for Craftsmen (for example, carpenters, welders, and bricklayers)
Swedish for Truck Drivers

Swedish for Bus Drivers

I am going to be starting SFEJ in March, so you can follow me on my journey there. I am curious to see how I will 1) survive 30 hours of Swedish class a week and 2) How quickly my Swedish will improve.

To get into the course, I filled out the application form and sent it in with proof of my qualifications, my resume, proof of residency and so on. Then I was called in to take the Swedish exam, which consisted of a computer exam covering listening, reading and writing, and various chats with people working at SFI which seemed to result in a speaking grade. All in all, with waiting, being sent to the wrong person, being given the wrong exam to start with, doing the exam for the level after SFI and other running around, I was at the testing centre for about 5 hours. I hope your visit there goes a little more smoothly! Don’t forget to take a number when you arrive either, and bring along your passport for ID.

I am looking forward to the SFEJ course, and think it is pretty amazing that the government offers such a specialised course for free. Of course it is in any governments interest to help highly skilled migrants to quickly improve their Swedish skills and contribute to the economy, however many governments seem to forget this, and it is refreshing to see Sweden putting something into practice. As for the quality of the course, I don’t have an opinion yet, but i’ll be updating once I get started.

Folkuniversitetet

Folkuniversitetet is an adult education institute in Sweden and offers all sorts of courses, including Swedish language. It runs based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, with A1 being an absolute beginner, (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2), and C2 being at a near native equivalent. As the classes are a mix of nationalities, the course is obviously run in Swedish, even at the beginner levels, which is not as difficult or intimidating as it might sound.

Folkuniversitetet offers a range of courses, for example I have taken the 2 nights a week course in Uppsala which runs for around 5 weeks, as well as the monday to friday course, for two hours a day for a month. They also offer courses that focus entirely on conversation and other on grammar. These are paid courses, ranging from 2675 SEK for the 2×2 hours for 5 weeks course, and 4000SEK for the intensive course 5 days a week.

From personal experience, the quality of these courses depend entirely on the teacher you have, and I have been in both good and average courses. However, I have found in all 3 of the courses I have taken at the Folkuniversitetet that the teachers ask for feedback after a couple of lessons to make sure they focus on the areas we wish to improve – say more conversation. Class sizes are small – around 6 to 10 people, which gives plenty of opportunity for everyone to chat.

Quite a few people in my intensive course were just in Sweden for a month to take the course, before returning home to their job/studies, so this might be a good choice for you if you are only in Sweden short term, or want to pop over to improve your Swedish and enjoy the summer!

Medborgarskolan

Medborgarskolan is similar to Folkuniversitetet, an adult educational institution offering Swedish as a second language classes. They have translated the names of the courses into English as well, and offer intensive and normal courses.

University

Stockholm University offers a course for more advanced students for free. You can read more about it here. I’ve heard positive things about this course from a past student.

If you are an exchange/ERASMUS student, Swedish classes are often offered during your time in Sweden. At Uppsala University for example, you can read about classes here.

Universities and adult educational institutes in your home country might offer Swedish as well, so it is worth calling their language department and seeing if you can join. I studied Swedish at The University of Melbourne in Australia for a year before moving to Sweden, and it was a huge help in making me feel more at home when I arrived.

A Year in Sweden

I have now lived in Sweden for just over a year. I arrived in Uppsala last January to finish the last six months of my masters, then moving to Stockholm in August.

Quite a bit has changed since I first arrived – I am now volunteering at a fantastic organisation that helps the partners of people that have come to Stockholm to work with learning Swedish, finding work, understanding Swedish society, and very importantly, providing an instant social network and plenty of wonderful classes.

I am getting to work in my area of integration studies and immigration policy, and I am hoping this leads to some interesting opportunities this year. I have even been asked to give some speeches by a few organisations in the upcoming months, which is both scary and exciting.

Other things have changed as well – my Swedish has improved, but I am still reminded of how far I have to go when I listen to announcements on the train and can hardly understand a word of what is being said. My 30 hour a week Swedish course starting in March should help with this though.

The weather has been one of the most noticeable differences – Before we moved to Sweden I had been here about 7 or 8 times before to visit friends in both summer and winter, but nothing could prepare me for actually living here.

Despite working in London and barely seeing sunlight there for months on end, Sweden is in a totally different league. In January for example there is about 6 hours of sunlight a day (Compared to around 19 in June). Living in Uppsala, I rode my bike everywhere – to class, to do the shopping, to meet friends. Even when it was -20 degrees Celsius. I experienced the peculiar feeling of having my eyelashes freeze as I rode along and developed impressive multitasking skills of bike riding one handed in snow storms while shielding my eyes and attempting not to run over pedestrians while also not loosing my bag. Winter in Uppsala was beautiful and with so much exercise and socialising every day, I barely noticed the almost continual darkness. This year in Stockholm was a bit different. I take the tunnelbana everywhere and as I don’t live in the above cute red house filled with friendly students, I am not as social this year, which has led to me feeling quite a bit more tired. The gym seems to be helping, as does meeting friends a bit more regularly, but I still have a bit to learn above surviving the Swedish winter.

I have never seen such an amazing spring before living here. Our seasons in Australia are not as prominent, one melting softly into the other, and summer lasting seemingly forever. I remember cycling from our house in Uppsala along the river and through a park into town each day, and it seemed as though in the space of only a week, the landscape went from grey and white to the most amazing kaleidoscope of colour – the thick green grass shot up almost overnight, flowers started to appear and I couldn’t help smiling at the beauty of it all, and being amazed at how quickly it happened. I am also impressed with how much care the gardeners in Uppsala take, constantly planting new flowers after old ones have died, and even including flower boxes along bridges as you can see below.

Summer in Sweden is a wonderful time, suddenly the parks are filled to the brim with people lying around reading, having picnics and grilling sausages, playing music and chatting. Little wooden stands start to appear though out town selling delicious punnets of fresh strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. Oh, and the sun almost never sets – I went for walks through the forest at 10 pm at night. The sun was up again at 2 or 3 am. In Australia I tended to avoid being outside in summer due to the ridiculious temperatures, not to mention the giant hole in the ozone layer and that fact that I have red hair and my people are not meant to live in tropical climates, but summer in Sweden is quite nice – not crazily hot.

If you do visit in summer, I can highly recommend visiting the Stockholm archipelago, with some islands only 30 minutes away. One friend of ours spent a week drifting from one island to the other, catching fish, camping and picking wild berries.

We have also moved 3 times in the last year, which seems to be below the average number of moves of people I know in Sweden. I’ll be posting some tips about renting an apartment in Stockholm shortly.

I have also learnt quite a bit of random information about life in Sweden in the last year – the medical system, how to get a person number, a bank account, an ID, how to renew your visa, study at a Swedish university and quite a bit more, but all of these things will be covered in their own posts.

I am not actually sure how long we will be living here, but as Geoff has just started a new job in December, it looks like we will be here for the foreseeable future. I am looking forward to seeing how life in Sweden is this time next year.

Darkness and Christmas Adventures

The last couple of weeks have been a bit hard. I have been going to Swedish class each morning, and doing my Swedish homework in the afternoons, but apart from that, my motivation levels have been quite low and I have felt completely exhausted.  This might have something to do with the fact that we currently have about 2.5 hours of sunlight per day, and even this has been thwarted by heavy cloud cover and rain. When I moved to Sweden in January I was not bothered at all by the darkness, and I enjoy winter normally, so I have no idea what the problem has been lately.

I bought a cute Swedish Christmas light to brighten up the apartment. If you are in Sweden at Christmas time, you will see little arrows of light in almost every window from one of these.

Miraculously, over the last couple of days I have began to get my enthusiasm back. I have done more things this week, than I have in the last two weeks combined, and it feels really good. I am starting to work out what I need to focus on next year to be able to get where I want to get – career wise and so on. Now that I have a personnummer I am able to apply to take the Swedish for academics course next year, which is an intensive course broken down by study specialisations, run by the Swedish government – with the added bonus of being free. I need to submit more proof of my past studies than I do for any of the PhD applications I am working on, but I think it will be worth it if I am accepted.

I also had a great day today catching up with an old friend from Melbourne who stopped by Sweden on his way to moving to Seattle. We walked for hours all over Stockholm, visited Skansen and relaxed in cafes. The sun even came out – Jerome must have brought it with him from Australia.

My main excitement this week is that Geoff and I are off to Nuremberg in Germany tomorrow, and I can’t wait. This will combine many of my favourite things, Christmas markets, world war two history, and of course, spending time with Geoff. We will also be visiting Prague for a few days as well, and I am sure it will be amazing.

So god jul, and have a wonderful Christmas time, be it in sunny Australia or in (hopefully) snowy Europe – and everywhere in between!

Learning a New Skill: The Four Stages

There has been an interesting conversation circulating lately on a couple of interpreter blogs about the four stages of learning.

While I am not an interpreter, these stages can obviously be applied to learning any new skill. Learning a new language springs to mind, but I also think this can be applied to ‘learning’ a new culture as an expat or immigrant, and I think this lines up quite nicely with the four stages of culture shock.

So on to the four stages of learning:

1. Unconscious Incompetence

‘The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn’ (1).

Language: There was a time when I did not really value learning a second language, despite the fact that I grew up in a Dutch/English bilingual family environment. I remember complaining to my mother at the age of 12 or so, that I never planned to live overseas, so why did I have to study Japanese at school, a language I did not then, nor now, have any affinity with. I didn’t see any value in acquiring this new skill… luckily I came to my senses a couple of years later, and language learning is now one of my greatest joys.

Culture: Otherwise known in culture shock terms as the honeymoon phase. Here I am imagining a newly arrived expat, fresh off the plane with suitcase in hand. Everything about their new home is an adventure, interesting, quaint, charming, exciting.  Sometimes people are completely oblivious to cultural differences and probably make quite a few faux pas without even realising it. I think quite a few people skip this stage moving to a new country, and enter straight into the conscious incompetence stage.

2. Conscious Incompetence

T’hough the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage’ (2).

The key to this stage is that we know that we don’t know a certain skill. This is an amazing thing, an opportunity. This is the point where we can make the conscious decision to learn something new, making plenty of mistakes along the way.

Language: I feel I am between this and the conscious competence stage with Swedish and German. Sometimes I learn something in Swedish class and I am amazed at how necessary that little bit of grammar is to being able to communicate normally in Swedish, and I wonder how I even got along without that bit of knowledge (or never noticed it before). This is a perfect example of my mind switching, bit by bit, from stages one to three.

I am starting to be able to have everyday conversations, but I am very aware of how much vocabulary I need to learn to be able to communicate at the same level I can in English. This is especially evident in a social setting – I am simply not able to relax and just have a chat with new people in Swedish yet, although I am able to understand a lot of what is being said.

Culture: In culture shock terms, this is known as the negotiation phase. Here things can get a little more difficult for a time. Our expat realises how much there is to understand about their new home – a little example is when I lived in Austria, I had no idea when I went shopping for the first time that I had to weigh and label my own vegetables, and was yelled at when I when up to pay, but I definitely knew the next time.  You go through plenty of experiences like this (ok, minus the yelling). as you find your feet. At this stage you can become quite frustrated, depressed, and compare your new home with your country of origin. Learning a new language can also be a consideration here, so you will simultaneously be going through multiple skill learning stages. To really become a part of your new culture, learning the local language really is important: it is the gateway to making local friends and really understanding the cultural and linguistic nuances of the country.

This is definitely the most frustrating and difficult time, and it is natural to feel overwhelmed when you realise how many new things you need to navigate. But things do get better, and slowly as you learn more and more about your new culture, things start to get easier. The key here is to spend time with people who have already gone through this stage, and even some who are having similar experiences. You can share knowledge, support and help each other. Things improve.

3. Conscious Competence

‘The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill’ (3).

Language: With parts of German and Swedish, I do feel I am at this level. For example reading German and Swedish, I feel I can get along quite well – with some serious concentration – and understand most of what I am reading. Watching movies in Swedish and German that I first watched a few years ago really show me how far I have come, as I no longer need the English subtitles, but I do need German or Swedish ones. This is an amazing feeling and gives me a push to improve even more. The moment I can make a friend in Swedish or German will be a true testament to being firmly at this stage.

Culture: Or the adjustment phase. Here life in the new country gets quite a bit easier. You are able to navigate daily life without so much stress, going to the bank, shopping, taxes, social life, are pretty natural occurrences. Again, language acquisition can be important is reaching this stage. The time it takes to reach this stage really depends on the person, but it is suggested that 6 months to 1 year is an average timeframe.

4. Unconscious Competence

‘The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned’ (4).

For this stage time is the main factor. Being able to use any skill without needing to think twice about it takes a significantly long period of time. To master a skill, Malcolm Gladwell suggests 10,000 hours. Let’s break 10,000 hours down: If you are extremely diligent and manage to dedicate 3 hours each day to your new skill, it would still take you a bit over 9 years, or almost 14 years Mon-Fri. Most people are unlikely to have the time to spend even 3 hours per day on a new skill, so realistically this could take quite a bit longer.

Obviously the idea of 10,000 hours is not set in stone – there are people that can become very competent in a language after only a year, but unconsciously competent after 1 year is very unlikely. For example, the Goethe Institute recommends you take 700 – 1000 45 minute sessions to be able to take the TestDAF, at the C1 level, the certificate equivalent to being able to study in German at a Germany University (using the Common European Framework of Reference for Language Learning (CEFR), with A1 as the beginner level, and C2 as near native). 750 hours of study to be able to attend university in the language seems quite tiny compared to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, but of course this is all very personal. There is no way to measure the exact number of hours it takes for anyone to become fluent, as it has so much to do with intensity, motivation, opportunity to practice with locals and so on. After 10,000 hours of developing any skill, I’d be quite a bit worried if your were not unconsciously competent.

Language: I would realistically expect in 15 or 20 years to be able to consider myself unconsciously competent in German and Swedish. This is of course entirely dependent upon how many hours of language learning I put in over the years, of keeping up my skills should I return to an English speaking nation, and so on.

Culture: In terms of culture shock, this is the Mastery stage. You have a second home, and while you probably still retain much of your old culture, you are able to negotiate life in your second home with ease, assimilating your new and old cultures into a delightful hybrid culture.