Swedes have superhuman English abilities. For an American like Mo Kudeki, this makes life easier. But the flip side is that learning Swedish gets extremely difficult.
I’d like to give a big round of applause to everyone in Sweden, for your incredible English skills. Seriously, you are all AMAZING.
Yet, Swedes are either blissfully unaware, or just uniformly incredibly modest, about their superhuman English abilities.
I have asked many a Swede how on earth everyone’s English got so good — they usually respond that they start learning it early on in school, or that they don’t dub American TV shows… but surely those two factors alone can’t explain how so many people who have never even stepped foot in an English-speaking country can speak flawless, accentless English.
I have Swedish friends who could have told me they were Americans and I wouldn’t have thought twice. And it’s definitely a Sweden thing — hop over to Copenhagen and the English drops off noticeably.
I chose to study in Sweden partially because there was no language requirement. I didn’t realize that meant I would never have to utter a word of Swedish if I didn’t want to.
People here actually apologize for speaking in Swedish if they come up to me on the street and ask for directions, once they realize I’m foreign and didn’t understand. Really, there’s no need to apologize! It’s your country! It’s bizarre to walk into a room full of Swedes, and having the entire conversation switch over to English just for me. I feel welcomed, yet suspicious — maybe this whole “Swedish” thing is just a ruse and you are all actually native English speakers.
The flip side to Sweden’s English-friendliness, though, is that it makes it incredibly difficult to actually learn Swedish. Study all you want, practice is how you actually learn a language. In the 10 months I lived in Japan, I could probably count the number of English conversations I had on one hand. However, when I try speaking in Swedish here, I feel as if I am greatly inconveniencing everyone since they speak English perfectly and would probably prefer to actually communicate than play teacher with me. It took over two weeks to get my pronunciation of “hej” down enough that the workers at ICA would speak to me in Swedish instead of English (yes, Swedish “hej” is different than English “hey”).
So progress is slow. But with help from my Swedish teacher and my extremely occasional Swedish conversations with friends, I’m confident that by the time I go home, my Swedish will be just as good as the English ability of the average Swede…who is seven years old.
6 Comments
Johan
I’d say TV and education like you mentioned, but I’ve never really thought about it. I don’t know much about primary and secondary education in other Scandinavian countries, though, so perhaps there’s not much of a difference there in terms of learning English.
Also, since almost everyone is reasonably good at English, I think people expect you to be good at it. Swedes who don’t know English very well might feel like they don’t quite “fit in”.
Pejterw
Flawless and accentless? – not completely true, especially the latter part. Depends on whereabouts in Sweden a person comes from, but most still have a Swedish accent when speaking English; some even a very thick one at that.
As to the reason of the level of their skills – it’s the, so called, Americanization in Sweden (media, traditions, behaviour patterns, etc.) that makes Swedes seem more like coming from the States than from Sverige.
An Holmqvist
You know, I’ve found that “hey” and “hej” are becoming more and more interchangeable for me. Or am I actually saying “HEJ, what’s up in Boston these days?” when I call my American friends? :[
Mattias
In my experience, most fellow swedes THINK they speak incredible english while in reality, it’s just ok. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly not good enough to fool a native. I myself CAN fool a native american and I’d say I learned the most of what I know from tv. Tv, tv and tv. And I have a knack for impersonating people which makes the pronounciation easier. I also studied english in school and at uni. but never really learned anything there that has had an effect on my speaking abilities. That was mostly about grammar and writing.
Bear
Vi använder väl hals och tunga lite anorlunda. Hade en Eng flickvän och hon hade prob med just “hals” ljuden. Lycka till med språket 🙂