Over the summer I thought it would be a good idea to order some books on Amazon that were in Swedish so I could practice my reading and expand my vocabulary. I, of course, decided to get all three of the "Dragon Tattoo" books because they were originally published in Swedish. I had also already read the books in English and had seen the three Swedish movies and first American movie. The first time I sat down to "read" the first book entitled "Man som hatar kvinnor", literally "Men who hate women" (whereas the American version is just called "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"), it took me an entire hour to read the first few pages. I had to google translate basically every other word and filled the blank spaces between the text with their English counterparts.
Although this was incredibly tedious at first, the more I translated the more comfortable I was becoming with reading the book. It definitely did help that I had some idea of where the plot was going and that a lot of Swedish words are similar to their English counterparts. I also began to realize that I was constantly looking up the same words and then immediately forgetting them on the next page so I began a system where if I saw a word I SHOULD be familiar with I would underline it and then I made a separate sheet of paper as a vocabulary list in my own handwriting with those words and their English translations. By the time I was a few chapters in to the first book I had an entire pages for prepositions, one for adverbs, and one for commonly used verbs. I found this to be very helpful and by the end I had inadvertantly memorized a lot of words and phrases!
Reading in Swedish, however, did prove to be difficult because sentence construction is quite different from English and because the book used a lot of colloquialism that I had a hard time translating and also used phrases unique to the Swedish language that either couldn't be translated directly into English or did not make any sense outside their Swedish context. Sentence construction was hard for me to understand because I do not know Swedish grammar rules and therefore couldn't understand why, unlike in English, some sentences begin with the verb rather than the pronoun. So like if in English I would say "She ate a salad", there would be times in Swedish where it would look like "Ate she a salad" which made very little sense to me. And naturally there were many times where I would translate something literally and then the translation wouldn't make sense. For instance if you wanted to say "Starting from..." in Swedish you would say "Från och med...", which literally means "From and with...", which kind of makes sense but stil isn't exactly the same as "Starting from..."!!!
Comments
I think it was an excellent idea to read "Man som hatar kvinnor", but maybe you should try a different approach? Although I also liked your idea of underlining and writing down the words you "SHOULD" be familiar with, I think a more relaxed attitude could have been less overwhelming. You could just read a few pages without looking up any words, for example and see if you could guess the gist of the story, or some of the words from the context. We can discuss this in class. mycket bra reflektion!!