beachhead

I have established a beachhead on the Swedish language coastline. Starting approximately 10 days ago (24 November) I was able to have conversations about more than the topics revolving around dance and my background. Not hard conversations, and very slowly. But conversations. It's funny though in that I still hear things in English. My grasp is more at the code book level, as I translate the words and assemble the result. A few times I can construct sentences using Swedish grammar instead of English but my speaking rate drops even further.

According to Jacob my grammar isn't all that bad. I'm mostly getting the word order correct, and mostly getting my declensions to agree, and mostly getting the right pronounciation. Jag börjar förstå svenska istället för att förstöra det.

My current nemesis is partikel verb. Verbs followed by particles. English has the same thing, and I never realized it. For a simple example "I blew the horn" vs. "I blew up the horn" mean rather different things. Even better, "I blew up the pipe" could mean that I exhaled into an pipe going upwards, or making it explode. There's a slightly different pronouncation in those two.

Swedish has the same thing. "att hälsa" means "to greet" while "att hälsa på" means "to visit (somebody)". Depending on the stress "Jag hälsade på dig" means "I greeted you" or "I visited you". But then again like English there are words with different meanings, each with different prepositions and which are not particle verbs. (Particle verb have the stress on the particle.) For example, "att höra" means "to belong" and "to hear". "Det hör till ..." always means "It belongs to" because "till" is not used with hearing. Like in English, "I hear to" does not make sense.

While in Swedish you can "hear after" ("höra efter") something, meaning to inquire about something.

It takes 10 years to master a new topic. I've got more than 9 years to go. :)