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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.) <\/p>\n
I’m pretty sure nobody finds this fascinating aside from me… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/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":[103],"class_list":["post-42333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42333","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=42333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42333\/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=42333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}