Talar du svenska ?

One answer to this question could be : "Jag talar inte svenska, men jag förstå lite svenska !", which basically means : "I don't speak Swedish but I can understand Swedish a little !".

As you can imagine, it is not always easy to live in a country where people speak a language that is not yours and that you know nothing about. It is even quite annoying not to understand what people are saying !

That is why, a few months ago, I decided to take some Swedish lessons. Then, during 5 weeks, I was going to a Swedish class, twice a week, 2h15 everytime. One could think that it is quite a lot and that in that time, you can learn lots of things. But actually, when you start learning a language and when you have absolutely no knowledge about it, you realize that there are LOTS of very very basic stuff that you have to learn, much more than you expected. So after 5 weeks, I knew many of the basics of the Swedish language, but unfortunately, it was not enough to have even the more simple conversation with somebody (except from "How are you?", "What's your name ?", Where are you working?" and so on...).
So the best thing would have been to continue going to this classes... which I didn't do. There were many reasons to this, but the main one was that it was really time consuming, and after a day of work, it was hard to find the motivation to go for another 2h15 of full concentration. I have to admit that I have been a bit lazy...

So I kinda gave up. But since a few weeks, I realized that even if I am not able to talk, I can understand more and more. I think it is mainly because I am working in an almost complete Swedish environment - almost only Swedish people in my company, lots of documents are in Swedish and so on... so I don't really have the choice. But that is a good thing. Today, we even had a workshop and that was mainly hold in Swedish. I thought I would get completely lost after the 5 first minutes but actually I understood quite a lot of what has been said. I was very proud :) My dance classes are good for that as well because of course, they are all in Swedish, and it is a completely different vocabulary, so another way to learn !

So know I have decided that would learn Swedish, not in class but in my every day life, being more careful when people are talking, trying to understand headlines in the newpapers, listening to the radio... and maybe the next step will be to buy a TV... ?!