Kan du talar Svenska?

Can you speak Swedish? You may be surprised at how much you can understand, given the similar German roots of English and Swedish. Take for example, this sign promoting a magazine article hyping the Sex and the City movie (which opened here last weekend).


The sign says "Läs Charlottas intervju med SJP från Sex and the City." Translated, this says "Read Charlottas interview with SJP from Sex and the City." (I love the use of "SJP" as well.)

But just when you start to gain some degree of confidence in your recognition of cognates, you pick up a newspaper and are completely lost. Well, at least I was when I bought one a couple days ago. So the two languages aren't very similar after all. I took a couple semesters of Swedish when I was at Berkeley, and I would say I picked it up even faster than I did Spanish. That said, I've lost quite a bit in the interim, and it's been a challenge regaining it. I did the completely nerdy thing of bringing the flash cards from my Swedish class, and although I haven't been too diligent with them, my review of verbs the other night was quite helpful.

Unfortunately, the blessing and the curse of living in a country where nearly everyone speaks English is that as soon as I show a lack of comprehension, the person will switch to English and there goes my ability to learn by immersion. Even the Palestinian proprietor of the cafe where I'm typing this switched to English on me (and then proceeded to tell me how terrible the politics are in the US -- I can't say I disagreed). So I've still got three weeks here, and my goal is to be able to get to the point where the person on the other side of the counter doesn't automatically switch to English as soon as I open my mouth. The colleague I'm working with is Danish, and he says it even happens to him, so I'm not overly optimistic, but I'll do my best.