h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I know it's great weather back in Sweden. I get frequent feedback from my family back home.
But I still don't really miss home, cause the weather here is fabulous. And I'm not really the kind of person to miss home that much. I pretty much go by the "Where I lay my hat is home" motto, to some people's dismay. My aunt thought it was outrageous that I called Scotland "home" after just three months of living here.

Ach well.. I still like it here so I don't really miss Sweden much.

Ooh, I'm pretty messy with the word home too
I live in the Caribbean, so this is home, but when I get depressive and sick of the island Holland is home. When I go to Holland in the vacation I say:"Yay! Home!" and then wherever I'm staying there is called home and when I'm going back here I'm going home too

Where in Sweden did you live?

Miriam

Well, I don't really live in Sweden. I live in Scotland, right now.
But I come from the south east of the country, from a little village called Torsås (meaning Thor's Crest) just south of Kalmar, which I babbled on about earlier in this thread. Not much of an exotic place, but we did have a tame (well, pretty much) moose as a tourist attraction a couple of years ago.

Whereabouts in the Carribean do you reside, then?

I know, I did use past tense, didn't I? (maybe I didn't, having some concentration problems lately thinking of something else )
Aah, I found Torsås on my wonderful map... Is a tame moose interesting?
Anyway, I live on this hideously boring island called St Maarten..

Hej då
Miriam\

You found Torsås on the map? Wow, that must be a pretty good map. Usually it's only marked in road atlases and similarly detailed maps. As I said, it's a really tiny place.
There's basically nothing interesting about a tame moose, except for the bus-loads of Germans that came to see it every year. They seem to have this strange fascination about mooses, for some reason. I guess that's why they bring our "moose warning" signs home with them, after they've been on vacation.

It is a road atlas actually And I dearly love it, I can find most places in Europe in it
Of course we all know Germans are slightly weird I guess you can compare a tame moose as tourist attraction to The Little Mermaid in Kopenhagen I guess mooses make them feel at home...hahaha

Sorry for the slagging off of the Germans Didn't mean it in a bad way....

Miriam

ACtually the Green Line of the Stockholm subway is the fastest route to take...if you're not in any kind of hurry...then it comes along promptly and is almost completely...undangerous?

/Native Swede

You

You are correct, Miriam, when you say that Germans are a bit weird. And for some reason they all think that all Swedes know how to speak German, so when they step into shops in Sweden, they speak German, which only a few people understand, and even less can actually speak. This results in a usually very blank look of non-understanding, followed by the question if they can speak English instead.

And to the native Swede, it clearly states earlier in the thread that the green line isn't really reliable if you're in a hurry.

And for the record, I don't like double postings.

So, have you ever met a German who actually *tried* to speak Swedish while in Sweden? Personally I think it's awfully arrogant to go to another country and then expect the people *there* to speak *your* language... but then again I also hate people who don't make the tiniest effort to understand you, no matter where it is. So basically I just go for multilingual people
So, can you expect from most Swedes that they speak English?

Miriam\

English is taught in public schools from 4th grade in Sweden, and has been so for the past couple of decades (since I'm a product of the 70s, I can't say about previous of that), so most people knows how to speak English. And since films and TV-series isn't dubbed, but sub-titled in Swedish, people get some pointers from watching tv as well, keeping their English knowledge up-to-date.

Then again, German and Swedish, though terribly different as a whole, isn't as far apart as one would think. There are a lot of words in German that Swedes can "pretty much" figure out, just using common sense (like schuhe which means shoe), while some other words are gruesomely different (like zimmer which means room).

4th grade is exactly what age? (I'm confused by all the different schoolsystems and different ages when children start school )

Anyway, I speak Dutch and English and when I concentrate well enough I can read most things in Swedish...och jag kan prata lite på svenska

Miriam

4th grade is about 10 years of age. I think nowadays they even start in 3rd grade at 9 years of age.
Then in 7th grade at about 13, they get to choose if they want to learn French, German or something else, like typing skills or mechanics or something.
I studied German for about three years, but I still can't speak it. I can pretty much understand it, but I really can't speak it.
But I get around anyways.

In Holland they start teaching English in the 5th grade, age 10/11 and then when you start highschool (7th grade, age 12/13) you get French and German too. Here we have the Dutch schoolsystem, but instead of German they teach Spanish, since there's not much use for German in the Caribbean
Well, I feel like I haven't learned anything in my French and Spanish lessons, I can construct some really akward sentences though So generally I don't admit to having been taught those languages for three years
And now I'm trying to learn Swedish... don't ask why

Miriam\

You know, Swedish can be very useful in some situations. Like.... Ummm.. Well, basically only when you're actually in Sweden, I guess, or handling Swedish tourists or something. Other than that, Swedish is a pretty useless language.
Kind of like Latin.

Tru or false?

People told me Sweden would be perhaps a bad place to learn Swedish, for if you ask anybody a question in (more or less) Swedish, you will get the answer in clean and smoth English.

Hejda
jj

It's also useful when you have Swedish friends, well, maybe not, but it's fun anyway

Of course you could try to say: Vill du prata svenska med mig? Jag vill lära svenska. Or something in that direction.
My current method is someone's Swedish course on internet, a dictionary, a daily newspaper and a Swedish chatroom, it works, but you won't learn to speak or understand the language...


Miriam\

To answer your question, Jonas, it depends on the person you ask.
If that person can hear that you're more comfortable in speaking English, and they too are confident in their English, they will probably answer you in English. Others may answer you in Swedish, but I think it all depends on the person you ask.
I think personally I'd try to answer in Swedish at first, and then maybe, if the person seemed uncomfortable with his Swedish, I'd go to English instead, mainly to avoid any misunderstandings.

Using Swedish that you learn in a chat room might not be the best idea, cause you get all kinds of funny habits. I know from spending a lot of time in English chat rooms. I use "gonna" instead of "going to" and all sorts of other strange habits.
Reading the newspapers online in Swedish is, however, a pretty good idea, since they're supposed to use "proper" Swedish.
But as you say, Miriam, learning to read Swedish isn't really like learning how to pronounce the words you're reading.
Keep at it, though.

Well, when ever you see me walking, talk Swedish to me I'll probably look really confused it it happens to be within now and a year, but that's okay

I see what you mean with strange habits in chatrooms though Like e instead of är... but then when I don't know something and I ask people usually tell me when something is slang...

I suppose that when you can read and write a language it only takes a little more to learn to pronounce it and to be able to understand somebody speaking it..... well, I'll let you know in a couple of years

Miriam

I personally think that the implementation of the "Short chating" where one uses R instead of are, U instead of you and the likes may deteriorate young people's writing skills. Sure, almost anyone these days knows that "How R U?" is a question that concerns the recipients health and well being, but still, it looks really ugly. Also, even though I use it myself, my personal view is that using more and more of the spoken language when writing uglifies the written language.

The written word has always been a bit posher than the spoken word, probably because most people in the old days knew how to talk, but not everyone knew how to read and write, and the persons that knew how to read and write was the upper class that could afford an education. Therefor the way the upper class spoke was implemented as the way it should be written. Since almost everyone today knows how to read and write, there are more and more people that uses "spoken language" in their way of typing.

This, however, is merely my own personal view and I can honestly say that I have no idea how I got in on this subject.