Swedish is not an easy language to learn. And no, it's not because I am American and speak nothing but English all day long...I actually do know other languages. Living in Sweden and not speaking the language makes me feel like an idiot. I'm a relatively smart person and can get out of a pickle pretty easily, but in Sweden I feel trapped inside a body that can neither make the necessary phonemes nor employ the standard Swedish musicality and tone to my speech. No matter what, I feel like a walking imbecile some days.
This became more evident just the other day when I saw a sign on the local cafe's door and snapped a picture to ask my coworkers about it. This time last year we were still settling into the newness of living in Sweden, intimidated by everything, and barely understanding questions akin to "how are you?" So now with a little more confidence (though, remember, still a walking imbecile some days) I take in the things around me, gathering pictures and notes to ask friends and coworkers.
Dave and I learned the hard way that Swedish has a lot of compound words. And, I recently learned that one way to tell if someone is new-ish to Swedish is by their use of (or more accurately, lack of) compound words. Looking things up in the dictionary is complicated because of this, and until you have some basic vocabulary it is hard to know where to parse the compound words into smaller units. The dictionary is almost useless sometimes. A great example from wikipedia is nagellackborttagningsmedel which means nail polish remover but really is more like nail polish away taking stuff (1).
Walking around town I realized that a little knowledge can in fact be a dangerous thing. Dave and I stood across from a business which said sjukgymnast. Is this sjuk + gymnast or sju + k + gymnast? Gymnast can be inferred from the similar English word, but we had sick (sjuk) and seven (sju) and k (which, I didn't know what it would be but I wasn't going to judge). Open to all possibilities. Sick gymnast or seven k gymnasts? I opted that it meant physical therapy, but it took a few minutes to convince myself.
Which takes me back to last week. I took this picture thinking to myself: Sunday soup...what's that? And why is it only served in December? Is it a special Christmas-time thing that we missed last year? I will definitely have to ask about it.
Good thing I waited a few minutes and figured out that those were just the Sunday hours for the month of December (Söndags=Sunday's + öppet=open). But now I do want some sort of imaginary Sunday soup (which might be something like Söndagsoppa).