Do you remember the old TV comedy ‘Mind Your Language’? This is exactly how my swedish class is like. My classmates are from Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Poland, India, Kenya, Peru, Romania and China.
The classes are conducted every weekday morning between 8.30 am to 12 pm. During these 3.5 hours, the instructor only speaks Swedish and try to teach the students basic swedish grammar, vocabulary and how to pronounce Swedish words accurately. Ultimately, we need to pass the tests and get a certificate to show that we can speak Swedish somehow. Without this certificate, it will be almost impossible to find a local job here. So I have been told.
It is definitely not a piece of cake. Maybe it is my age but they could at least make the class more interesting. The teacher is very critical and maybe she herself has forgotten what it is like to learn Swedish when she first arrived from Russia. The grammar, the pronounciation and melodic way of speaking is not easy. Maybe it will be less complicated if they don’t have those 3 extra alphabets – å,ö,ä
My classmates are nice but we hardly spoke because not all understand English. We are still struggling to find the words in Swedish and the questions are limited. Whilst i struggle with it, Linn seemed to find it really easy and her teachers in school told me that she is picking it up really quickly.
But I can tell you this..although my Swedish is far from perfect, my mandarin is improving. Most of the time, I speak to my classmates from China. I have never spoken so much Chinese before. Thanks to my classmates from China.
