So although I don’t have the results from my first Swedish exam, there were enough places in the next course for me to continue. I miss my old teacher very much (thank you Fredrick Persson, you are great!), and am tempted to not take the course for credit and just take his group on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but unfortunately this conflicts with my choir rehearsal Thursday evenings. Hopefully this new class will be just as good. The students in my class seem nice, although the gender ratio is a bit off from 50/50… there are only, like, 5 girls out of 18 students, I think… and a lot of Germans, who will probably make the rest of us look bad since they seem to learn Swedish easier. I can’t tell if our teacher, who ”is from Russia,” speaks differently than a native Swede, but she’s nice and maybe her perspective as a non-native Swedish speaker will be interesting.
Although, I put ”is from Russia” because sometimes here it is confusing when Swedes say what they are, ethnicity wise. For example, I have been told that if people were born in Sweden BUT their parents were born somewhere else, they will say they are from that other country. Or that they’ll say they’re half American if one of their parents is from the US. While, in the US, maybe it’s more common for people to just say where they were born. Is this a reflection of the American attitude about ”the American dream” (eg. from rags to riches in one person’s life) or general historical acceptance of immigrants (excepting, of course, that big wall on the Mexican border…)? I guess this surprised me because I have always thought of nationality being distinctly separate from race that if people ask me where I’m from and seem confused that I don’t say some Asian country (I am ethnically half Chinese) I get pissed off. Anyhow, I’m off to class (and now it’s dark outside, 4:37 pm), happy Monday.
