learn Swedish

I just finised reading Stieg Larsons Flickan som lekte med elden (the girl who played with the fire) in Swedish. The book is roughly 630 pages and I surprisingly didn’t have any major difficulties understanding it (although i didn’t get every word).

Now I just need to focus on speaking and understanding spoken Swedish. I’m thinking about registering for some discussion courses to practice!

I went to the movies yesterday to see Männ som hatar kvinnor. (Swedish for “Men who hate women,” renamed in the English translation as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). The movie is based on the award-winning novel by the late Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson, the first in his “Millennium Trilogy”.

Anyway, while watching the film I was surprised to learn how much I really understood of the spoken Swedish! :)

...and by the way it’s a great movie :)

I will move to Stockholm in aprox. 7 weeks so i’ve decided it’s time to spend more time working towards this goal. From now on I will devote 20 minutes every day studying Swedish. I’m using a program that is called “Svenska utifrån”, which is a beginners textbook as well as a lot of grammar exercises.

The textbook has 150 short lessons so if I’ll manage to complete 3 lessons every day, I should be able to finish the “course” before I move to Sweden. That would be a great headstart before I will be “thrown into the deep end”! :)

I just bought an “isländsk-svensk / svensk-isländsk”-dictionary yesterday which is kind of the starting point for this goal. I’ll be moving to Stockholm in exactly 100 days (on 14 August) so I better get going on this one right away!