I studied Swedish daily via Pimsleur or Babbel or Duolingo–to the point where a friend with Swedish relatives said my accent was really good.\u00a0 “You sound like my uncle!”
Though I’d be teaching in English, and Sweden ranks very high in Europe for English language fluency, I wanted to be able to talk to Swedes when I traveled around the country in their own language.\u00a0 I was busy, busy, busy.<\/p>\r\n
On the academic front, I planned a creative writing course and a course in Swedish crime novels in translation.\u00a0 We were fired up. But my colleague and I hit a massive roadblock.\u00a0 Lund University insisted on having one of their professors do guest lectures at $1500 an hour and assigning us a student assistant for several thousand more.\u00a0 Our budget couldn’t handle those expenses and they wouldn’t negotiate.\u00a0\u00a0 End of a dream. After breakfast very morning, I have a second cup of coffee and do 10-15 minutes of Swedish On Duoling and feel as calm as if I’m meditating. My favorite Duolingo Swedish sentence is in the title of this blog: Jag kan inte hittar mina byxor<\/em>.\u00a0 I would love to have the occasion to use it there to see how people react.<\/p>\r\n Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in many genres, most recently State University of Murder<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n Twitter photo credit: Jerker Andersson\/imagebank.sweden.se<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back when I was still teaching creative writing at Michigan State University, a senior colleague at Michigan State University’s English Department asked if I wanted to join him to start a summer abroad program in Sweden.\u00a0 I didn’t hesitate.\u00a0 I’d been watching Swedish movies and reading Swedish mysteries for years.\u00a0 The program was going to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2253],"tags":[95,1343,1325,1060,1203,2255,2257,2256,2259,2258,700,1100,1102,2213,1463,1619,1346,2261,2260],"class_list":["post-5842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sweden","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-french","tag-german","tag-language","tag-language-learning","tag-language-study","tag-languages","tag-lock-down","tag-lund","tag-lund-university","tag-michigan","tag-michigan-state-university","tag-msu","tag-pandemic","tag-study-abroad","tag-sweden","tag-swedish","tag-swedish-crime-fiction","tag-swedish-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5842"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5884,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5842\/revisions\/5884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Working-at-the-home-office-174751537_483x725-200x300.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\r\n
When the pandemic hit and Michigan went into lock down, I found myself at loose ends and bored, since I wasn’t working on a book.\u00a0 I looked around for ways to structure my time when everything seemed so uncertain, and Swedish seemed a natural choice.\u00a0 Since March, I’ve been re-experiencing the joys and challenges of a language with some similarities to German but oh-so-many differences.\u00a0 Like the articles tacked onto the ends of the nouns: Hus<\/em> is Swedish for house, and the house is huset<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n
When all this is over, I would still like to travel to the south of Sweden, which is beautiful and close to Copenhagen, and see the gorgeous old college town of Lund.\u00a0 It’s apparently small enough to walk or bike across in less than half an hours. Lund is also close to where the Wallander mystery series was filmed as well as the larger cities of Gothenberg and Malmo. I’ve kept all my travel guides in the hope that it comes to pass.<\/p>\r\n