Børk! Børk! Børk!
For some, today is the last day of the spring semester at UMR. For others, tomorrow's commencement ceremony will mark an end to their UMR journey. For Amy Edwards, a student writer in the UMR public relations office, her time in Sweden as an exchange student is drawing to a close. But before she leaves, she's sent us the following dispatch detailing her experience:
"What did you do yesterday?" my teacher asked in Swedish on the third day of our intense, two-week language course."Yesterday..." replied the Australian student next to me, thinking very carefully about his words. "Yesterday, I ate my Swedish class."
When you're speaking in another language, it's easy to make mistakes. It's natural to make mistakes. I've been studying at Lund University in Sweden since January, and I still forget the difference between "glass" (ice cream) and "glas" (literally, a glass) -- which means that when I broke a glass in our kitchen last week and wrote a note to warn my flatmates, I told them to watch the floor for broken ice cream. "How in the world do you break ice cream?" one guy asked.
The strangest word similarity comes from the word "gift," which means marriage. It sounded very sweet, comparing marriage to a gift, until I discovered that the word also means "poison."
Once my Swedish language course ended, I was thrust into the world of the Swedes with only a dictionary for protection. This sounds far more demanding if you forget the majority of Swedes can speak English, and at the university level, they can speak it very well. That doesn't mean my Swedish friends don't make occasional mistakes when the conversations turn to English. "Be careful there," a friend warned about a nearby town. "A lot of people have been rubbed recently." Rubbed? "Yes, it's unusual, but people will come up to you and rub you when you least expect it." It took a while to realize he was referring to muggings and robberies.The most important aspect to learning Swedish is mastering the pronunciation, which is key to keep from sounding like the Swedish Chef in the Muppet Show.