This has been a really interesting first week! Ultimately I am really happy that my Swedish tutor is teaching both me and Malory at the same time. Swedish is a language that has many sounds and especially vowels that are hard for Americans to say, without practice. Therefore, I've already found it to be so helpful that I can meet up with Malory and check with her to see if she thinks I am pronouncing a word like Louise had in our meeting!
I also have been finding that it is very helpful, when I am learning new words in Swedish, to think of how I would say that word in Spanish. I took Spanish all through high school and some of college so I feel pretty comfortable with that language and being able to relate Swedish vocabulary especially back to Spanish has been a good tool for me.
This week I have also discovered that looking for youtube videos of people speaking Swedish and even podcasts on Itunes in Swedish has been helpful because I think getting used to hearing the language is important because then you can just implicitly understand what is being said.
This week Louise taught (and struggled with) Malory and me how to pronounce Swedish vowels. This was rather difficult because to my untrained ears they all sound very similar. In addition, Swedish has three more vowels than English and one of those vowels is I sound I never make in my daily speaking in English! Although it was/is hard to get all the vowels right, I've already discovered that knowing how to say vowels makes it so much easier to know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it. For instance, the word for "yellow" in Swedish is "gul". The first time I said it aloud I pronounced it "guhhhl". But, once I knew that "u" in Swedish is pronounced "ewwww", I knew that the word "gul" should be pronounced more like "geewwwwl".
I've really enjoyed this first week of practicing my Swedish with Louise and Malory and I'm excited for the weeks to come!
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