Attended my first formal Swedish lesson last night. It’s great to recapture the simultaneous thrill and frustration of trying to have a conversation in a language you don’t really know.
It’s a small class – Swedish isn’t exactly one of the “big-name” languages out there. I always feel sorry for the student who can’t seem to shake the bad American accent. I remember in high school, we had a student who spoke German with a thick Midwestern accent. It was painful to listen to.
I thought it was just me, but it seems to be a common trait: When people are learning their third language and they get stuck, they instinctively fall back, not on their first language, but on their second. For me, it means that when I can’t find the Swedish word for something, I substitute the German word. One of my classmates falls back on Spanish. (Technically, German isn’t my second language, but I never got very good at the other language before German, so German acts as the de-facto second language.)
I’m pretty sure nobody finds this fascinating aside from me…
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