Swedish class stories
Swedish class stories.
Part 1
In last night's Swedish class my Aftonbladet fixation came to light. I keep the printed-out stories in my main Swedish folder; I'm not ashamed. Well, not very.
The teacher was worried, not by the vulgarity, but that that the language wasn't likely to be sophisticated enough grammatically.
One of our class activities is reading a book, Den långa resan till Amerika whose (original) English version The Long Way to a New Land is recommended as being for reading ages 4-8.
Hmmm.
Part 2
The main "cultural" topic in the class lately has the 19th century Swedish emigration to America. One of my class-mates has married a Swede (which is her motivation in this scene) and dug up some letters from an emigrating member of her new family, and these have been worked in.
The teacher sent copies to people who missed last week's lesson. One recipient showed them to his (Swedish) wife, who said "I can't see why she's sent you this; it's boring, it's crap Swedish and it's spelt wrong". And that's true enough, it is a bit:
I'm on the bote. It's verry big. The wether is quite good.
But still, that's literary immortality; his writing has outlived him.
I'd settle for that.
Part 3: A confession
I don't have a Swedish spouse or Significant Otter. I don't even know any Swedish people. I've never even been to Sweden. This is my second year of Swedish evening classes. Nobody else in the class is in this situation.
It makes for interesting class dialogues:
Person: Har du varit i Stockholm?
Me: Nej. Jag har inte varit i Sverige. Person: ?????????
I'm working on it. Sort of.