This week we talked more about transportation and weather. On Monday we went over words associated with weather and Louise had us practice creating a dialogue using sentences structures we already knew and the vocabulary words we had just learned. I find that although it's nice to learn lots of vocab words so I can talk about many different things with the Swedes I know, the most helpful thing that we do with Louise is formulate sentences. The word order in Swedish is very different from English so this extra practice is really helpful. In Swedish, for instance, when you are asking a question the pronoun comes after the verb. The same is said for prepositions that come at the beginning of a sentence. So in Swedish you would say "Var bor du?" (where do you live?) rather than "Var du bor?" which would make more sense in English. Likewise, when you're coming up with sentences that start with prepositions like "on Wednesday" or "in February" the word order is also inverted. So I could say "Jag ska flyga till Spanien i februari." (I will fly to Spain in February." Or an inverted example could be "I februari ska jag flyga till Spanien." (In February I will fly to Spain." And even that example gets more complicated because you might think that it should go "ska flyga jag" but that isn't the case you can't end a phrase with a pronoun.
For these reasons it's really helpful that Malory and I have Louise guiding us. I think that by the end of the semester we will be better prepared to converse with one another in Swedish and we will be thankful that we are getting the practice. In the meantime we will keep learning lots of new words and adding in some grammar independently, but I think mostly practicing conversing together. What good is knowing a language if you aren't going to speak it to anyone??
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