This has been quite a week! Last week Louise and I both discussed that we were hitting sort of a plateau in our learning because we have gone through so many different "categories" of words to learn and there is only so much grammar that comes up naturally in our sessions that we can look up/learn for reference. So we were really starting to struggle and I could even feel a slight lag in my motivation to study/practice just because we had hit a wall.
But!!! This week. Much better haha. We took a quiz on everything we have been doing this semester (occupations, prepositions, country names/nationalities, etc.) and it was the most helpful thing we have done all semester. Louise had us translate very practical question sentences into Swedish and it made me realize that there was still a lot of practical grammar issues that I had not mastered. It's one thing to know vocabulary but a whole nother thing to understand how to use verbs in the proper order and tenses in order to make one complete/perfect question/sentence. So I'm looking forward to getting that quiz back and making note of what I need to improve on.
Something else that we worked on for our next section was translating some Swedish articles into English. I know that straight translation is typically not the best way to learn a new language because you need to engage with it, reproduce it, use it in contexts, hear it, etc. But at the same time I think that because we have been taking a very varied/interdisciplinary strategy to learn Swedish up to this point that it was helpful to do some straight up translation. I was happy to see that I could understand most of an article that I read about Facebook buying WhatsApp. I made note that it was helpful in this case that I already knew this news story and therefore it took the guess work out of deciphering the article. Instead I was able to just fill in the blanks where I needed to and learned some new vocabulary and syntax rules along the way!
P.S., it's really hard to memorize prepositions and I need to look into a better way of doing it. I tried making word associations between English and Swedish to no avail. Perhaps I need to focus more on using these prepositions in their proper contexts in order to remember them in Swedish? :)
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