When you have släktingar/relatives living in the US and Australia, as a kid I was always fascinated by språk/languages. Add to the fact that we had cable TV which meant we were able to see fler/more shows in English, than just the two state channels we had genom/throughout most of the eighties.

When I started seventh grade, it was naturligt/natural for me to want to study a new language, but unlike ALL the boys in the class, I chose franska/French over tyska/German. I can’t really remember if it was because someone said that German grammatik/grammar was a mardröm/nightmare or if I just liked the sound of French better. I should also erkänna/confess that I was not exactly a school nerd. I never fully understood what the knowledge I was gaining was good for, other than you know, getting a job. This insikt/insight came much later.

In high school I decided on the humanities branch of social sciences which meant three languages beside svenska/Swedish and engelska/English. I continued with French, took up spanska/Spanish as well as Latin which was mandatory. Not for the sake of speaking Latin, but for language förståelse/comprehension. If you didn’t know it, a lot of words come from Latin in one way or another.

My French lärare/teacher, to be honest, was a hard-ass. Teaching the same way year after year with a balance between somewhat aggressive and self-indulgent. I actually failed the second course there. More on that later. Spanish was so much lättare/easier for me. I loved my teacher and you should never underestimate what a good teacher can do for certain students. I got the högsta/highest grade, but there was a reason for that. I studied more, beyond just my hemläxa/home work. During the summer break, while working as a paper boy, I had a structure. Each morning (night actually) I would focus on a certain grammatical thing, like böja/bend a certain verb group, or reiterate certain adjectives over and over again. When school started igen/again in the fall, I could bend every irregular verb in every tempus possible. I had a bone structure for my continued learning.

Since I failed the French course and didn’t want that on my grade sheet, I set out to make up for the course after graduation. I sat in the källare/basement of my cold storage work every lunch and studied verbs, adjectives and nouns. I believe I knew well bortom/beyond what the course required for the highest grade, and yet I only got a pass for some reason. But either way, my envishet/stubbornness had once again gotten me through.

The more time I spent on the Internet, getting to know people from olika/different countries, the more my curiosity for languages grew. When I asked my followers to translate a few meningar/sentences into their language for a video, I realized after getting 30-50 different languages in, that you could clearly see patterns. It was almost like a Swedish word travelled down through Europe and ibland/sometimes beyond, changing little by little on the way. Kind of like how dialects work. And this is how I see languages.

They are broar/bridges into other cultures, the path into our neighbor’s doorstep. And when you start to lära/learn a language and you have that wow moment when you suddenly realize that you understood what that South-American ledare/leader just said on the news, then you have the nycklar/keys into another culture.

For as much as we can grow within ourselves with knowledge and erfarenhet/experience, it is by giving parts of your culture to another and receiving parts of their in return, that you truly transcend beyond all you thought you knew about yourself.

When people frågar/ask me if I speak many languages, I often say that Swedish and English are no-brainers, and I would probably survive if I were to be dropped somewhere in Norway, Denmark, France and Spain. But of course, there are still so much for me to explore on this linguistic resa/journey. But I do hope that this place can be a piece of your puzzle in understanding and emerging yourself into Swedish.

Gott snack/good talk

Bonus info
All the images are from different language challenges on my youtube channel TheSwedishLad.