Swedish - 18 April

When you google shoulder-stand, it is always images of women come up. Why is that? Not that I'm complaining.

Every time I do some Swedish, I do a shoulder-stand. Linking brain work to body work.

I started Swedish at the end of January. It's pretty easy, and satisfying too. As easy now as German used to be. I'm up to almost my 800th line. And I've used the same resource throughout: Lögner or A Wanted Man, by Lee Child.

As of today, though, I'm refining my approach. In English, I read through a short section of about 20 sentences. Then I switch to Swedish and go over that same section. I do that in landscape mode, and in a moderately small text size. Then, I copy every sentence that fits within one line.

I do that so as not to have to think about and decide which sentences are i-plus-1.

Order and ending

The order in which I do languages.

At one point, I did them by running through the alphabet i.e. French , German then Japanese. But then I felt that it could be better to alternate 'hard' and 'easy' languages.

But no, it is probably best not to think of them in those terms. Better to say 'familiar' and 'less familiar'.

But anyway, the more familiar, the bigger the chunk of text. For example, with Swedish it is about a screen's worth (of about 100 words). I find that Swedish is rapidly growing more easy.

Another thing to think (I thought) about, is of when I call a halt to the day. Otherwise I'm quite likely to continue indefinitely.

Maybe set a boundary of say 2 hours per day. Give myself a reward if I stop on time.

Nitty-gritty Swedish

Although I read at speed, there are words that I recognize. (And remember, this happened in the course of 1 minute - my very first minute ever of Swedish!)

• Numbers: nittio, nittiotre
• Direction: österut
• Verbs: viste, farten, log, löpte
• Tense: var, hade
• Pronouns: han, man
• Articles: en, den
• Prepositions: av, andra, upp, ut
• Colour: gröna
• Adjectives favoritual, lång
• Nouns - a wealth of words similar to how they look in English and other languages I have some knowledge of: tummen, näse, vägen, natrium lapor, minuter, kurs

I place no pressure upon myself to learn, memorize, recall or reproduce any of the above. I don't consciously categorize. For now, all that I'm doing is to recognize what's in front of me (on paper).

Swedish at speed

In a typical classroom lesson you deal with a single grammar point, and focus on a perhaps 25 words that the teacher imagines are new. You might spend an hour. You'd then forget most of it. That's life in the classroom.

Whereas I do things differently.

In a single minute, I cover 170 words. It's not just vocab, as the words are connected. They make up a grammatical felt. They convey meaning and message. The particular piece of text (Jack Reacher) I'm concerned with has 100 unique words, with the rest repeated 2, 3 or more times. My brains gets to choose what's important, and what to focus upon.

I don't consciously try to commit anything to memory. Instead, across a wide swathe of language, I improve my understanding of multiple language items by a few percentage points each. And that adds up to much more than a structured classroom lesson.

Cast an eye

I open the book to where I'm up to. That happens to be the first place in the story that the main character, Jack Reacher, is mentioned.

Now then, although the book is in Swedish, a language new to me, I cast my eye quite quickly across the text. I do not study, inspect, guess, puzzle over, try to fathom, or wonder about what I don't know. I don't look up unknown words.  I simply glide my eyes at speed - at what I imagine would be the rate of normal speaking - without back-tracking, pausing or slowing down.

I cover the first chapter, taking 5 minutes that had taken me 3 minutes in English.  That feels about right, because in English I read more quickly than normal speaking speed. I'd probably take 5 minutes instead of 3, had I been reading aloud.

Nevertheless, in Swedish I already seem to be reading more quickly than a Swede would speak. I don't imagine that 170 words per minutes is generally attainable.  Those 170 words make up 11 sentences. That's nothing to sneeze at. If I were to spend ten minutes, I'd cover ten times the territory. That's a heap of Swedish.

How will acquisition work?

I've a bunch of books in different languages that I use for language acquisition. I don't need dictionaries or grammars. There's no need for them, the way that I do things. Which then begs the question: How does my way work?

Let me demonstrate in some detail (perhaps greater detail than you care for). For this demonstration, I'll pick on Swedish, as it's the most recent language that I've chosen to pick up.

Why Swedish all of a sudden?

Well, I have Swedish to hand (on my Kindle), but no Norwegian. And in terms of what I do, I'm not fussed which Scandinavian language I choose. One is supposed to be able to understand all of them (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) once you know one of them. So instead of an 'N' for Norwegian, I now have two 'S's' - Spanish and Swedish.

The title of the book I'll use is Lögner, by Lee Child. (Its English title is Wanted Man.) There are 79 short chapters - nice bite-sized chunks. The plan is to do a chapter at a time. It takes me about 3 minutes for each in English. Now for the Swedish version . . .