Why I study Swedish / Varför studerar jag svenska

Probably the four most famous Swedes (including the one who’s Norwegian)

I’ve been studying the Swedish language (and to a lesser extent, Swedish culture) for about five years.

Why am I studying a language? I’m doing it partly to prove to myself that I really can achieve a minimal degree of competence in a language (after having failed several times with other languages in school), and partly because I’m embarrassed at being a monolingual American (though in another blog post I’ll go into reasons why we Americans shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves on that front). I’m not studying a language to help my career or connect me to ancestry or open up new parts of the world that otherwise would have been closed to me. Swedish won’t do any of those things.

Why Swedish, then? There are lots of good arguments against it: it’s only spoken by ten million people (smaller than the combined population of Oregon and Washington), I have zero Swedish ancestry, I’m not helped by knowing any other Scandinavian languages, and virtually all Swedish speakers under 40 speak great English.

There are a number of reasons I picked it. Each one individually might not seem too compelling, but add them all up and it doesn’t seem like such a crazy choice.

• The United States Foreign Service Institute (the agency that trains our diplomats) puts Swedish in the “easiest” category of languages to learn for English speakers.
• There are plenty of books and online courses on Swedish, so I don’t have to resort to formal (and expensive) classes.
• The Swedish government sponsors two daily news podcasts (one in simple Swedish, the other in really simple Swedish) that are intended for immigrants new to the country, but are perfect for me too.
• I respect Swedish culture, with its heavy liberal slant, emphasis on moderation in all things, and tradition of humane treatment of all sorts of people.
• I’ve already failed to make any useful or satisfying progress at learning Spanish (four years of high school), German (two years in college), and French (one year in grad school).
• As a non-traditional language for an American to learn, it’s something I can feel a sense of ownership toward, which provides ongoing motivation.
• Since so many Swedes speak such great English, it feels respectful to return the favor.
• I’m a big fan of Swedish (well, all Scandinavian) mysteries in TV, movie, or book form.
• Danish sounds horrible (search it out on YouTube if you haven’t heard it), Norwegian confusingly has two written forms, Icelandic is spoken by only a handful of people, and Finnish is in a totally different league of difficulty (it’s seriously hard).
• People keep telling me I look Swedish.

Language knowledge falls into four categories: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Every language I’ve studied has presented an obvious and consistent order of difficulty: reading is by far the easiest, listening is significantly harder, writing is slightly harder still, and speaking is basically impossible unless I live in an area where I can get constant feedback and correction. (As an aside, I wonder if other people with differently wired brains would rank these skills in the same order?) Since I won’t be able to live in Sweden or Swedish-speaking part of Finland any time soon, I don’t consider spoken competence to be a realistic goal, and it’s not something I’m working toward.

I do have concrete goals for the other three skills. Some day I want to be able to read or listen to the harder of the two Swedish-for-dummies news broadcasts (which are all transcribed into written form too thanks to the state-run radio network) and understand enough that I don’t have to look any words up in order to get the big picture and most of the details. I also want to be able to read a normal, not-for-dummies Swedish newspaper and get the general sense of what’s going on in the world (even though many of the details will escape me). As for written skills, I’d like to reach a level of competence where I could in theory (not in practice!) be a pen pal for a Stockholm fourth grader.

So that’s the rationale behind this project, and a summary of my goals. Future blog posts will cover progress updates (there’s a lot to report after five years of study!), changes to these goals, and observations about the language learning process.