Because everybody here speaks English. Perfectly.\nSometimes they’ll speak English to me even before I say anything. (My comparative silence probably gives me away as a non-native.) Other times they’ll notice that I’m speaking with a bad accent and switch to English. Some humor me by speaking Swedish until I finally break down and ask (in English), “I’m sorry, could you say that again?” because they’re speaking Swedish too fast for me to keep up.\nWhen dealing with non-Swedes, the default language is English. Not because people from English-speaking countries are so prevalent, but because English is everybody’s second<\/i> language. If a German and a Russian meet, they’ll talk in English.\nIn other language news: On the flight out of Seattle, a variety of newspapers were available and I grabbed what turned out to be a Norwegian paper by mistake. But it turns out that if you know Swedish, you can read a Norwegian paper anyway; it’s no big deal.\nYesterday, one of Jonathan’s corridormates listened patiently as I said “sju” (“seven”) over and over again until I could get the sj-sound right. It went like this:\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “Sju.”\nPeter: “Nope.”\nMe: “I give up.”<\/p>\n
Peter: “That’s okay.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because everybody here speaks English. Perfectly. Sometimes they’ll speak English to me even before I say anything. (My comparative silence probably gives me away as a non-native.) Other times they’ll notice that I’m speaking with a bad accent and switch to English. Some humor me by speaking Swedish until I finally break down and ask […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-39983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Because everybody here speaks English. Perfectly. Sometimes they’ll speak English to me even before I say anything. (My comparative silence probably gives me away as a non-native.) Other times they’ll notice that I’m speaking with a bad accent and switch to English. Some humor me by speaking Swedish until I finally break down and ask […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}