Sylvia's Journal

Because we are off to Sweden in just 4 months and because I love learning languages, I decided to learn Swedish, at least at a rudimentary level. When I see Swedish writing I can recognize a word here and there, but the spoken language is entirely unintelligible. Axel had bought a family subscription to Pimsleur and last week I started with lesson one and committed, as my teachers on the app suggest, to at least an hour a week. My schedule had been wiped clean because of the surgery. Not knowing in what shape I would be, I had removed all appointments. so I could easily make the commitment.

I like the Pimsleur approach of learning this new language. First I listen for about 30 minutes to a conversation between a man and a woman that starts with greetings, asking about understanding, how one is and such, and learn, word by word, sentence by sentence, the meaning and intonation. Because the program is geared towards English speakers I compare the English and Swedish which makes Swedish even more alien than if I would learn it from Dutch. Instead of using the same sentence structure as I would use in Dutch (it is the same), I translate from English with its very different sentence structure. Sometimes I recognize a sound that is quite similar to Dutch (although the intonation and emphasis are totally different). For example, the word for ‘not in Swedish and Dutch has the same letters, but not the same order: inte (Swedish) and niet (Dutch). I haven’t decided yet whether speaking Dutch is an advantage or not, but I know that the more languages you speak, the easier it is to acquire a new one. Onwards!

We went to the Boston Ballet today. While we were walking in downtown Boston towards the opera house i heard a couple in back of me speaking what sounded like Swedish. I turned around and asked them in Swedish whether they were Svensk, and yes they were. I asked them in my best intonation how they were, they responded that they were fine and asked me the same question. I was able to respond appropriately and surprise them. When we turned in different directions I was able to say goodbye and they understood me and said the same. The effort is already paying off.

The English learning program for Ukrainians in which I participate has now also branched out into offering opportunities for its English speaking volunteers to learn other languages. I marvel at the brilliance of the organizing team that realized it has access to a vast pool of native speakers of many languages. I looked over the listings and found a few people who wanted to learn Dutch. Now I have another hour conversation on my weekly schedule: aside from teaching Marina English I am going to teach Tatiana Dutch. We have only met on email and I have many questions to help me focus these conversations since I never taught anyone Dutch. Why she wants to learn Dutch, is not clear to me since it is not exactly a world language. Last night I saw another request for Dutch conversation which came from someone who had fallen in love with a Dutch fighter. That would be a very specific vocabulary. I have not been contacted by a native Swedish speaker, but if they are in the pool, I am so far the only one asking for that language.

I am a newly minted volunteer with an organization (Engin.org) that matches English speakers from all over the world with Ukrainians who want to improve their English conversation.
It has been more than 60 years that I was first introduced to English. I remember the challenges vividly, including, later in life, the gradual shift from English English to American English.
I remember in those early days how nonsensical English was to me. The way words were written and how they were pronounced seemed to have little to do with each other. Take the words ‘tough’ and ‘doughnut,’ they are not pronounced the same way, yet four of the letters are the same. Why not pronounce the word doughnut as ‘dofnut?’ And what about that letter ‘k’ that is usually ignored, so why have it? I also remembered how difficult it was to learn to pronounce the ‘th’ sound that did not exist in Dutch. I spit a lot when practicing, until I learned that I could get away with pronouncing the ‘th’ in a word like Matthew as an ‘f.’ It sounded nearly as good as the real thing.

I overcame my shyness about speaking English during a vacation in Wales with the family of my school mate whose mother was English while we stayed with her aunt who lived there. I was very self conscious at first because school English is nothing like everyday conversational English but after two weeks of total immersion one learns to move on. Little did I know that English would become my first language one day (albeit it American English).
In our conversation today we tackled where to put stress on syllables. I had to ask AI what the rule was when in fact I didn’t even know there was a rule (but there is).
We are 7 time zones away from each other. We meet at noon my time which is early evening where Marina lives, in a major industrial city in Central Ukraine. We talked, among other things, about the weather and I Iearned that spring is already on her horizon, while here we have to wait several more months. But just like here, their snow is dirty and there are potholes in the roads. And yet our lives are probably as different as can be, even though both of our countries are now at war – hers fought within and ours fought far away, at least for now.