Speaking Swenglish

There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay.

This visit, I have writing deadlines for paying gigs. So to keep my brain in English mode, I’m consciously only reading books in English , instead of cruising my mother’s well stocked library for Scandinavian mysteries. This is a trick I use in the U.S. when I sit down to write letters and emails home. I read a passage in Swedish or catch up on Swedish online news sites. I also play Swedish music. It works fairly well, although my mother says my spelling has become atrocious. I think she’s just forgotten that it’s always been that way—a trait that carries over into any language in which I attempt to write.

The problem with my method is that my brain has never fully entered Swedish mode this time, so I search for words during conversations and use a lot of “uhm” and “what do you call that thing that….” To add to the confusion, there are a lot of words that sound the same in English and Swedish, but have completely different meanings. For example, the word karl means “man”, but is pronounced just like the English word “car” if you speak my Swedish dialect. This made for some hilarious misunderstandings the other day when I told my friends about the new models I’d been test driving at a dealership.

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How about you? What tips and tricks can you share that will help me pop my brain into correct language/voice/character mode?

(This post is also available on Bark.)