Berlitz Total Immersion Day 3

I woke up this morning determined not to think of it as the hardest day as the teachers had said. I was determined to get my backside into the class and soak up as much as I could.

Today we covered a lot, prepositions again as well as when to use ‘hem’ and not ‘hemma, ‘hit’ and ‘dit’. I had to sit an exercise on the past tense which is a tricky one especially the irregular verbs. I came out of it ok though, in fact I got a lot of the naughty ones right, must be down to the increased reading effort I have been putting in of late. Good old DN and Bamse!

I do relish the way the Berlitz Total Immersion course challenges the pupil all the way. Their main goal was to increase my confidence in speaking Swedish and I have to say I think its starting to work. Started having some heavy conversations today all around my favourite topic..no not Morrissey..but politics!

Nuclear power, animal rights, unemployment, all good stuff!

The ‘dubbel’ lesson is a battle. Thats when you are in a three way conversation with two teachers. Today we looked at cinema listings and I had to find out what Teacher A liked and come to an agreement on what to watch. Then we had to come up with a suitable time for both of us…no easy feat with such a busy teacher. Then I had to pretend to call Teacher B and ask her if she wanted to come with us. She did but didn’t like the genres Teacher A and I liked so more conversations, questions, then what to do before and after.

After the exercise I like the way the teacher then goes through my spoken faults…and points out the errors. Teaching at its best. I have made the mistakes so its good to know what they are and get to work on them.

The session after lunch was about word order and I think I overcomplicated this and was pretty close to throwing a hissy fit. Luckily I just asked the teacher to go through it from the top which she did. There was some tension in the air, I am surprised its taken this long to be honest but she did well and I think it clicked. A bad workman blames his tools, I know, but one of the books is a good exercise book but it doesnt really förklara the grammar! Luckily the resourceful teacher brought in another book which was much better. Mind you I still dont get why these academics cant write grammatical expressions in simple language. Come on, own up how many of you had heard of Preteritum before?

I studied Latin so know a lot of the grammatical terms but come on boys have a day off and churn out a grammar book that we can all understand!

Once I got that it was on to over 4 hours of conversation and debate on different topics.

The teachers all said they were impressed with my development, the cynic in me thinks this is motivational… I said it was hard for me to really judge if I moved on from Monday morning. She explained that its harder for me to see progress as opposed to a new starter which is fair comment.

I am starting to ‘tune in’ to spoken Swedish now. I  have been ‘talked to’ in Swedish for 24 hours now this week and I think thats paying off.

I dont think my written Swedish will improve significantly but there are books and self study for that but if I come out on Friday night, order a nice large Scotch and the barman doesnt know I am a Brit then I will consider it a success, incidentally if I can chat up the good looking barmaid with a combination of British charm and a Swedish accent then I may well book myself in for the next level of the intensive course in 6 months time

I am shattered again though, hardly any energy to cook tonight…it certainly feels as if something is squeezing my skull!

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Related posts:

1. Berlitz Total Immersion Swedish Day One
2. Berlitz Total Immersion Day 4
3. Berlitz Total Immersion Day 2
4. Berlitz Total Immersion Day 5
5. Total Immersion Swedish