2016.09.16: Whew! Humbled by the French woman, encouraged by the Finnish woman

I woke up early and started to review more vocabulary that was in this week’s Swedish homework. I had to go to Johannelund and print out a short essay which was assigned, as I don’t have a printer yet at home. The prompt was (in Swedish), “What I do well (do good).” I wrote that I am good at facilitating meaningful cross-cultural experiences, and gave an example of this past summer. Even though there will some grammatical issues, I like the way it came around full-circle in just one page.

I arrived on campus in time. I’m still giving a few extra minutes to allow for travel by bike. It ended up that I was way early because of the Swedish “academic quarter.” The posted time is that class starts at 9:00. However, the teacher and most students don’t show up until 15 minutes later.

The quarter system dates back to the days when the ringing of the church bell was the general method of time keeping. When the bell rang on the hour, students had 15 minutes to get to the lecture

While I knew about this, I still wondered if I might have missed an email from the teacher that morning, as emails for this class are sent to my work email address. I figured the greatest likelihood was that the delay was this 15-minute fudge factor. I’d just wait around (and practice more vocabulary on my Anki intelligent flashcard app on my phone) and see if people would show up.

Yup. The teacher showed up about 9:12 am. At 9:15, there were only 3 of us students. Eventually, we had 6, including 2 more who weren’t with us last week. So, instead of 11, we were a smaller group.

At the beginning, my conversation partners were a French woman and a Finnish woman. The French woman looks in her twenties and is working on a PhD in biology studying the human genome to determine prehistoric human migration. She works in a lab where English is spoken, and she also speaks fluent German. She was doing rather well in Swedish too. Her language capacity is humbling, but I realized that I’m not totally out of my league in this class. I am not too far behind the French woman in Swedish (forget French and German), and I think I’m a bit ahead of the Finnish woman. This twenty-something woman commutes from Stockholm every school day, where she is studying the affects of social media and free speech. Her English is exceptional, such that after hearing her first couple of words, I wondered if she was from North America. No, but she is obviously exceptionally fluent in English.

So, while I’m still struggling to track with all of the teacher’s Swedish, I can usually understand the topic and some, but not all, of the details. She speaks a bit faster than I would like. She is helpful and has us engaged in active learning with helpful exercises. We did quite of bit of talking to our conversation partner, which is important for me to get my brain connected to my mouth.

After class, I asked the teacher (in Swedish) about a recommendation for a Swedish – English dictionary (but not with such good grammar as this English sentence). I realized that I need to see some more things in a context. My flash cards are helpful, but there is something for visual learners about seeing things on a page. Specifically, there are many words that either begin with “for…” or “för…” I have a theory that actually seeing these on a page (with some of my color-coding memory associations) will help me remember which words are “for” and which ones are “för.” So I stopped by the bookstore and bought a big dictionary (over 777 pages).

So, my Swedish library is growing.

Friday afternoons are good times to do laundry. Marv, your words to me of “soon not everything will seem new” encouraged me today. I had a little more sense of what I was doing in the laundry room today. Anya helped with the laundry and did a great job of folding my clothes.

The afternoon weather was stunningly beautiful.  Some of the warmest September days on record have been seen in several parts of Sweden. I figured out a way to MacGALver (or jerry rig) my travel hammock. I hung it from a door hinge inside and strung the hammock to the balcony railing. In the hammock — half inside the house and half on the deck — I read some of the post-doc research project that I’m evaluating and will discuss in Norway next Tuesday.

Perhaps you are wondering what I mean by MacGALver it. Well, here the background.

jerry-rig: To fix an object (usually mechanical) to a working condition in a haphazard way. Also known as doing a MacGyver on it. This can apply to any non working thing, to fix it in a nonconventional way. (Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jerry-rig)