Richard Stephens

Day 5

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 13:27:11 -0700

No update yesterday as I didn’t do anything other than duolingo and I didn’t have anything useful to add

Progress update

completed the duolingo section on plurals. Definitely seems harder than english where it’s just “chuck an s on the end and you’ll be right about 80% of the time”. The interactions with this and definite/indefinite articles are complicated
completed duolingo section on definites. this will also need a few more goes
“Du har överskridit antalet tillåtna försök att verifiera din telefon.” - Failed at verifying twitter too many times. Wh well.
Did excersise questions form Get started in swedish convewrsation 1.01. 2 mistakes, one incomplete answer.

Vocab i’m stuck on

Pojken - the boy
Kvinnorna - the women
Älgarna - the moose (plural)

(these are a problem because I haven’t learned all the plural forms in general yet)

Vocab:

om - likes

To do:

practise the plural and definite/indefinite forms a bit more

Day 4 - Sunday

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 02:12:17 -0700

I’m still unsure how often I want to post these updates. I think if I post fewer than 3 per week I’m not working hard enough, but I also don’t think there’s any sense in posting them every day if all they contain is “completed 20 minutes of duolingo on the subway”.

I didn’t look at anything other than duolingo today

Life and methodology update

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 18:02:30 -0700

A lot has happened in the past 18 months - I left Atlassian to work at Katasan on Qualify, we refocused our attention on Vire pretty early on, I learned a ton about technology stacks I hadn’t had the opportunity to play with yet (Node.js, React, React Native, Objective-C), and shipped an app to the iOS app store.

Earlier this year I finally made a very tough decision to do something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time: uproot my life in Australia and go to live and work in Europe. I accepted an offer from Jayway and arrived in Stockholm a few days ago.

Part of my post-Atlassian plan included grand ambitions to produce technical content. Write a blog, do more work on side projects, and produce some video lectures on technical content to put on Youtube. These plans have never quite materialised for a number of reasons. One reason was that they were simply over-ambitious, but one factor that hindered me was perfectionism. I was (and still am) unhappy with the quality of my own writing and of the content I was producing, to the degree I was concerned it may reflect badly on my professionally.

To help with this, I’m starting a micro-blog on my new side project: learning to speak the native language of my newly adopted home. This will serve a few purposes

help me to keep track of my own progress
permit me to practise my writing - in a field outside of my professional expertise
keep myself honest about the commitment I’ve made to myself - learning a new language as an adult is simply not going to happen if I don’t spend time on it every day

While it’s often said that the best way to learn something is to explain it to someone else, this is not an attempt to provide my own course and I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the content on my Swedish micro-blog. I’m making it public mostly to keep myself honest rather than because I think anyone will find it useful. Regardless, if you want to check it out, it can be found here.

Day 3 - Articles

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 07:31:53 -0700

One barrier to learning I’ve thought a lot about is the issue of assumed knowledge. That is, the teacher (be it a lecturer lecturing a large group or a book, online course, or video) will assume the learner possesses some prerequisite piece of knowledge. A lecturer teaching a university level maths course might assume that every student has knowledge of high school level calculus. This is necessary for the sake of saving time - no need to re-explain all the rules again - but will leave behind some students who have been out of high school for long enough to forget the details.

As a learner, the key is identifying the assumed knowledge and catching up on it as appropriate. In the context of myself learning to listen, speak, read, and write Swedish, this means, as I encounter and learn a grammatical concept in Swedish, I have to explain it in English and give some exapmles before explaining it in Swedish.

Articles

An article is a word that appears near a noun to identify the specificity of that noun. * The definite article in english is the world ‘the’, andrefers to a specific item of a class. E.g. The cup I am holding * The indefinite article is the word ‘a’ or ‘an’ (depending on context). E.g. A Beer from the bar.

The wikipedia page on articles goes into a lot more detail

In Swedish, the indefinite article for nouns is the ‘en’ or ‘ett’ that is prefixed before the word (e.g. ‘en ost’ - a cheese, or ‘ett glas’ - a glass). The definite article is formed by suffixing the word with ‘en’ or ‘et’. For example: ‘Osten’ - the cheese, or ‘glaset’ - the glass.

Progress update

Completed Phrases and Food duolingo modules
Still no twitter. The numbers just aren’t coming through clearly and I think I’ve tried everything it could be. Might get help from a Swede on this one on Monday.
described definite vs indefinite articles

Swedish numbers

0 - noll
1 - ett
2 - två
3 - tre
4 - frya
5 - fem
6 - sex
7 - sju
8 - åtta
9 - nio

These were taken from the learning Swedish site. This page also has recordings of what each number sounds like.

Vocab

bröd - bread
en apelsin - an oragne
middag - dinner
fisk - fish
kyckling - chicken
en frukost - breakfast
en ost - a cheese
en jordgubbe - a strawberry
en öl - a beer
en soppa - a soup
måltid - meal
kött - meat
fläskött - pork
ett glas - a glass
en kopp - a cup
- can be used like ‘en kopp kaffe’
en tallrik - a plate
gaffel - fork
sked - spoon

Day 2

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 12:46:53 -0700

Title: Day 2

Progress udpate: * started on duolingo * more work on GSIS chapter 1 convo 1

Swedish has 4 “genders” / sets of pronouns * Female (hon/she) * Male (han/he) * En-words (den/it) * Ett-words (det/it) The first two are used when talking about people and are more-or-less the same as in English. The second two are categories for objects, and each noun is categorised into one or the other category. There doesn’t appear to be any rule or reason for a word to end up in one category or another

Todo - tomorrow: * everything from yesterday that didn’t get done

Vocab * en smörgås - a sandwich * ris - rice * vatten - water * mjölk - milk * och - and

Day 1

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 11:12:52 -0700

Progress update:

Currently looking at “Get started in Swedish” chapter 1 conversation 1.

Wrote out breakdown of conversation looking at meaning of individual words and phrases
Listened to recorded conversation several times, trying to follow both Swedish version and English translation.
- This is still a chore for me with Swedish, as I haven’t yet got my head around the slight differences in some of the sounds and simply recognising where words start and end isn’t obvious
  - For comparison, for say, French or Spanish, if I listened to a sentence, I probably wouldn’t spell any of the words correctly but the word boundaries would mostly be in the right places. For Swedish I couldn’t even place the word boundaries properly.
  - I’m hoping this is just a matter of repition and practise
  - Also, I only landed in the country today. I’m sure the jetlag isn’t helping.
Set up Swedish Twitter account and followed a couple of Swedish journalists.
- Couldn’t set up Twitter on my phone because to do so I needed to verify my mobile number, which involved being called and read back a code in Swedish. I’m going to need to learn numbers to have any hope of getting this.

Todo for tomorrow: * Learn Swedish numbers * Finish setting up Twitter on my phone * Listen to and write out chapter 1 conversation 2 * Swedish Duolingo (mostly for help with the word boundaries thing)

Vocab from today: * jobbar - work * bra - good/fine/well (can be used in many contexts - e.g. That’s fine, have a good trip) * snart - soon * igen - again * tack - Thanks * Tack det samma - Thank you, the same to you (interesting how short this is in Swedish) * kommer - arrive * nästa vecka - next week

Last day

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 18:02:30 -0700

After four years at Atlassian, Tuesday will be my last day.

It’s been a lot of fun but it’s time for a new adventure. And also high time to start regularly writing a personal blog.