October 1st, 2003

Jag skrivar svenska inte so bra.

The nice thing about the schwa sound is that you don’t have to spell it.

Many thanks to C-J Berg for fixing my Swedish spelling errors. I probably introduced some new ones here, though.

But why Swedish?

Well, it wasn’t Swedish initially. Many years ago, I saw an ad in the local newspaper that read, “Free Norwegian lessons, Tuesday nights at Xyz Church, Ballard.” (Ballard is the Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle.) I read it and though Norwegian lessons would be a fun, borderline goofy, thing to do. Especially since I figured most of the other people in the class were there because their parents forced them. When the Olympics were held a few years later in Lillehammer I was again inspired to learn Norwegian, because the sound of the language appealed to me.

But it never really got past the “Gosh that would be fun” phase, until this year.

A friend of mine moved to Sweden, so I figured, “Well, if I’m going to learn a Scandinavian language, Swedish seems the better choice now. And besides, it means I get to talk to the people who work at IKEA in their native language!” (Nevermind that the people who work at the Seattle IKEA probably don’t speak Swedish anyway.)

The hard part is trying to prevent Swedes from switching to English when they hear that your Swedish isn’t native-fluent.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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