Learning Swedish in 489 days
Learning a new language, one step at a time.
How it started
It was May 1st 2023. I would go on a study trip with my peers. I shouldn’t say I was stoked for this study trip, I was still in winter blues and hoped this study trip would at least get me out of the house for a little while. I had heard that the country we would be going to is quite a cool and chilly place with a lot of nature. Though when I was looking through the small window plane: it clicked for me. It looked gorgeous, even though it was only through a slither of light that I was able to view the beautiful Swedish landscape that captured me with its high trees and farmlike houses. I needed this space to go out. I wanted to run outside of the plane as quickly as possible and when we finally got off the plane, I was hit by the language. Something that was a little too different to just read, things such as flygplats and utgång. And so, I was in dire need of a dictionary. Unfortunately, as my luck would have it, no bookstore was open, and the ones that were, did not have a English to Swedish dictionary. Nearing the end of the day I was able to pick up a peculiar Manga-like comic called Penguin rumble it looked adorable, and would be able to combine my language learning with things I already enjoyed. And so, while being tired after walking through the old parts of the city Gamla Stan (=gammal means old) but not without determination to start learning this new language I went to bed.
Starting the second day, I realised that I might as well start learning the language learning Duolingo, it is quite easy and would quickly make it a habit for me, so that I would at least slowly pick up the language and could do some serious work later. On the second day I also had the courtesy of having multiple people willing to cycle together, and it was great being able to experience the scenery of a new city with speed that is powered by one’s own legs. And because it was a bicycle, we were able to explore quite a bit of the city. Making it one of my favourite memories of the trip.
On the third (Stockholm University + SciLifeLab) and fourth day (SLU) we were able to visit the presentations of both Swedish professors and Swedish students pursuing a Masters’ degree. It was quite enjoyable to see what they were working on, one of which was to study what part of the Moose’s (älg) DNA determined that it became white-skinned. The way they did their courses was quite interesting too with slides incorporating question time, really engaging the students, even though I answered most of the questions due to my excitement… In Uppsala, we walked on one of the incredible hills they had with all the trees and the incredbile view over a small valley. It enthralled me with a view that I want to come back to. One of my friends was also able to find a dictionary and gifted it to me, thank you, Britt 💖.
At SLU, we had also received a pink T-shirt with a picture of a iconically hand drawn unicorn with the print: “Science is Magik med Bioinformatik” (Science is Magic with Bioinformatics). If you ever happen to see me on a sunny Thursday, I should be wearing it.
After coming back to the Netherlands, I was never seen as excited to ever come back to a place. I needed to back at some point, perhaps live or study there.
And so, my learning journey began, with 484 days left on the clock before had the possibility of studying there.
The plan & Different learning platforms
Learning a new language can be a daunting task, in my life I have had to learn: Dutch, English, French, German, Old Greek and Latin. And unfortunately, none of them, apart from Dutch and English stuck. Only some vocabulary from French pops up in my head sometimes. Malheureusement. Prior to this year I had tried to learn Japanese, but the Kanji and trying to read anything other than the roman alfabet had proven too difficult to me, or at least, I did not want to work at it anymore. Language has a lot of layers to it, and I am not even an expert. There are 4 distinct ways to communicate in any language, they are: reading, listening, speaking and writing.
Each of these layers should be tackled separately, one important point to make is that speaking levels up all the other skills to that level, since the user is able to make their own sentences on the fly and being able to communicate them to someone else, reacting on the situation.
And my dumbass brain thought it would be enough to just use Duolingo every day to passively pick up the language - I was wrong, dead wrong in fact. And I am glad that you pointed that out Suzanna💖.
Duolingo only tackles reading and writing for the most part, yeah, it has the listening and speaking exercises, but it doesn’t ask you to create entirely new sentences based on ideas, an app would not be suffice for that. Besides that, the heart system is also quite annoying, being only able to make 5 mistakes a day, watching ads, and doing more exercises to gain back hearts is getting quite repetitive and boring after 90 days.
So, I needed more ways to learn the languages, more options, different and fun ones. The first of which was the news, one of the strengths of the news is that is has many different bite size articles based on recent events; besides staying up-to-date with all that’s new in Sweden, including calamities and accidents (=olyckor). It also introduces new vocabulary and tests your understanding of the text, is the combination of the words that I am able to read, the message they are trying to convey. I was so hyperfocused during the trip that I was able to remember that the news site in the train was SVT Nyheter, and luckily anyone is able to download the app, regardless of whether you are in Sweden. >w<
The second thing that I added was a program for learning vocabulary, now you as a reader either know, or do not know about programs such as Teach2000 or websites such as WRTS. That employ a vocabulary strategy similar to the cards trick, where one of the words is shown, and the other one should be typed entirely correctly to have it pass, and the test only ends after each word has been typed out correctly at least once. This, is a very good method of learning new vocabulary, I forgot how satisfying it was to test myself on 25 entirely new words and being able to remember then in around 20 minutes. I wanted to make such a program myself however, I did not want to rely on different people making different things that would not be dedicated to my needs. So I made it myself, with NederlandsSvenska2000, shortened to NS2000, paying homage to Teach2000, and at the same time pointing towards the new vocabulary book I had received as parting gift, containing 2000 Swedish words with their Dutch translation. A book specifically for learning vocabulary. By learning 25 new words a day, or put another way, learning a page of that book per day would leave me with having learned 2000 words in 80 days, I’d say that is quite an achievement.
Whilst programming I remembered one of the video’s that is about multitasking of our brain, and that we are quite bad it. It has the premise of a person needing to write out all characters of the alphabet with their corresponding number below it, what they did not tell to the person performing the task is that they can do it in any order they like. So people often tend to do it the following way: a - 1, b - 2, c - 3… While this is a valid strategy, it is not the fastest, sine our brain likes to cluster objects. In programming terms, this means that we have a really fast look-up table for our alphabet, and a really fast look-up table for our numbers, but not the mix of them. So our brains have to swap between alphabet, number, alphabet, number. This is slow. A faster way to perform this task is by first deploying all characters, and then, deploy all numbers: abcdef 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… Conveying this message via written words is quite difficult, but you’ll notice yourself that what I am trying to convey is true when you attempt to do this yourself. Now how does this tie in with the vocabulary program? Well, Teach2000 and WRTS (even worse so) enforced users to go like this:
jag=I
du=you
han=he
hon=she
etc.
Constantly swapping between the two languages can get quite tiresome, WRTS was a website only service as far as I was concerned, it had worse settings too and some odd premium subscription deal. Anyway, even by perhaps doing,
jag=
du=
han=
hon=
First, you have to navigate continuously through the file, losing time - I am aware that vim probably has some way to remedy this, but I swear that my solution is faster regardless. Second, all edits would lead you to navigate hell too.
So how did we fix it?
Quite easy, using two files: Now each of the lines corresponds to the other.
jag
du
han
hon
I
you
him
her
This makes typing out the courses a lot easier, and courses are split by an extra newline:
I
you
him
her
we #<== this is where the second course starts
And so, a lot of words can be typed out rather quickly, it would surprise you how fast you can type words in a booklet in your mother tongue in a file like this. Your brain usually gets to optimizing and stores multiple words in the last immediately in your brain to reproduce them onto the keyboard.
One of the possible gripes about the new file format are so-called INDELS (Inserts and deletions) meaning that the different lines are misaligned, though this shouldn’t pose too big of a problem, since it is possible to check the linecount in any editor to see if the words are aligned, and if they are mismatched, real life binary search can be performed to see where the first word is lower or higher in the wordlist, it is kind of its own little game. With this method, I learn 25 new words everyday, and doing 25 words of the day prior. Ever building the vocabulary. As of today, I have learned 575 Swedish words using this method.
The third way of learning is using Tandem. It can be quite the hassle, since it is like the dating scene all over again. Not a lot of people respond, but the moment you find a buddy you will be good to go, asking all the questions you wish to ask to the native speaker. The app also has built-in ways to correct someone and call. Similar of which can be found in Teams, WhatsApp & Discord. Thanks to a single person - thank you John 🤍- I have learned for example that, single-word exclamations such as, “cool!” (=häftig), or “…boring” (=tråkig) are always in the third person neutral, meaning that it is actually tråkigt & häftigt. Other things such as talar, which Duolingo really liked to use, turns out not to be the common way to say “speak” often, people use pratar in stead. It the corrections and the ability to speak to someone that has experience in the language, often wanting to learn new things in the languages you speak too, that makes it such a pleasant experience the moment you find a good buddy to learn languages with.
Fun fact: A table for six has two distinct meanings in Sweden - Thank you John.🤍
The fourth way of using is reading literature, reading literature is one of the few ways to really test your ability to understand what you are reading. Even when not all of the words are similar, or understood, sometimes the text can just “make sense” in our heads, and having our own little stories in our heads with limited pool of words we are reading with our eyes. And if we got off-track too far, one well-placed sentence can bring us right back into the story in the language we’re trying to learn. Not only giving us a nice little story to read, but also providing us with grammaticaly perfect sentence rarely found elsewhere. I myself started with reading a chapter each day of the short story book and now also trying to read a few pages of Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige each day. Making sure that I am humbled by the words of a book for children. This will likely take me a year to read entirely with my current pace and understanding of the language.
Besides all these techniques I also have a formal introductory course book and resaguide for Swedish, I will not touch upon that further, know that I use them similar to how I learn the vocabulary lists.
Finally, I use a bit of Youtube and Netflix, watch some great shows in Swedish, or Swedish people gaming or doing other stuff and just enjoy it. This is more of a passive thing compared to all the other methods, although it is probably the best way to get to know the natural pronunciation of the language and the way you could listen to it. I hope to at least watch an hour of Swedish entertainment a week. Although, since it is currently summer holiday, I might just binge watch some Swedish shows.
A general overview of all my learning can be found in figure 1. It has all the different methods that I use to get to know Swedish better and tackle myself to become better at the language and the reasons why I use those tools.
Figure 1: All the difference methods that I use in order to become more familiar with the Swedish language, a good start for any person that is willing to go the distance to learn a new language.
Make it a habit
In order to make it stick, I needed to abuse a few systems in the brain. One of which is that the brain tends to make the easiest decision in its vicinity. So trying to learn a language on motivation alone is going to make you feel miserable after 3 weeks, and then quitting because there was no progress, no satisfaction, and it just got too hard. Is there a way we can use this to our advantage? Yes we can! We start the day with our new little habit. Using our alarm clocks, we can choose at what time we wake ourselves, and at what time we will do our habits, so we can make sure that our future selves is more easily able to perform the important task of learning daily, and luckily we are usually not very tired after a good night’s sleep; making it possible for us to immediately let our trap loose and make sure we immediately start on learning. Each. And. Every. Day.
Some other methods can be used as well, some of them are also explained in greater detail in Atomic habits, I would definitely recommend reading that book if you want to push yourself to greater heights, by pushing yourself a little each day. See table 1 how it it possible to use the different methods mentioned in the book:
Atomic habits have 4 stages: The cue - The awareness of a (desirable) situation The craving - Noticed the (desirable) situation and want to move towards it The response - Acting upon the craving The reward - Having performed upon the craving and seeing the resuls
All these 4 stages can be optimized with the following 4 keywords:
| Start a habit | Stop a habit |
|---|---|
| Make it Obvious | Make it invisible |
| Make it Attractive | Make it unattractive |
| Make it Easy (to start) | Make it hard |
| Make it Satisfying | Make it unsatisfying |
Below here is a table with examples of how you can employ these strategies into your habits, and make sure they stick, or they disappear.
| Makes it more easy to stick with the habit | Makes it harder to stick with a (bad) habit |
|---|---|
| Make it satisfying, create a stack by dropping an item each day, the stack will show your daily hard work | Make the habit as hidden as possible, no one should know about it |
| Make it accessible, oh, my novel just happened to lay here, might as well read it now - making things accessible makes it easier to do them with less energy | Make things not accessible at all, passwords, a remote all the way over there, slowly make you less likely to try attempt that habit |
| Write down your growth, one step is not going to make you walk a mile, but a lot of them can take you over mountains | Using Quit days, 2 days of not performing a habit makes the barrier already sky high to perform it again. |
| Change your environment, surround yourself with the people that want to gain similar goals, they motivate you, and you motivate them, being alone makes it more difficult to stay motivated and see the goal to its end. | By stopping surrounding yourself with people that perform a certain habit, it is easier to stay distanced from the habit itself too. A smoker usually doesn’t start on their own. |
How were the habits formed.
One thing that Duolingo is particularly good for, is creating habits. It has challenge, XP, following friends, daily reminders on your phone and it really likes to overstate how important it is in language learning, and how important it is to keep up your streak and learn a language. Quite the narritive. I do use Duolingo, I do not think it is a particularly bad app of any kind, not at all. It is a good app to start your language journey on, with other language tools that were also referenced earlier. Duolingo is excellent for creating a habit, so we start the day off with Duolingo, and we consistently finish 1 entire course a day (1/9th of an average unit), every day is a circle on our roadmap. On holidays I tend to prefer to finish 2 entire courses a day. Meaning that we have 2 circles filled with delicious gold every day. Using this, I have been able to finish around 116/325 lessons in 90 days; with an average of 245 XP per day. Having a vocabulary (according to Duolingo anyway) of just over a thousand words, I would take this with a grain of salt, Duolingo is often more of a game, and I tend to not want to lose any of my hearts too quickly.
Since 3 weeks, I have also added the 2000 vocabulary word list to my daily habit, of which I perform one new course each day, resulting in learning 25 new words on the daily. Which means that I have now learned 575 words using this method. I have made it more satisfying using similar techniques as Duolingo, the UI is that of a terminal, yet I was able to convey satisfying corrections and states of correctness by having red and green text, and purple text for the courses. The NS2000 program also has a script to provide insight(.jl) into the results which get written to a progress.tsv. Making it possible to make plots such as:
&
Showing the user how much they have progressed each day with the XP count, and the compound of their experience in both words and experience in the language. Writing the program was also quite satisfying, since the pieces fit perfectly together, and the end product is quite nice to use for a terminal program. Making it possible to run on any laptop with an IDE.
Thirdly, I also like to read the news every now and then, reading at least one article day, and making sure I read at least all headlines. staying up-to-date and everything.
Next, trying to make Tandem stick is a bit more difficult since it is reliant on someone else, but usually I have enough questions a day to ask, so usually this turns out okay. Having the right buddy to chat with can make all the difference.
Finally, reading, I tend to right during the bedtime hours, it makes my dreams a lot more hectic, and I am all there for it, reading a lot also tends to make me sleepier, so I think that is a good sign. So reading Swedish before going to sleep makes me sleepy and at the same time excited by learning new things. A true win-win.
Conclusion
With my current habits, I have been able to learn 1031/2361 words of the Duolingo course, with 22.048 XP in 90 days. Besides that, I have been able to rack up 7.700 XP in my NS2000 program, learning 575/2000 words in 22 days, and getting closer to that goal of 2000 words each day. I have been able to read 103/224 pages of the short stories at A2-B1 level. And 15/1151 pages out of Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige.
With 399 days ahead of me, I look forward to try and learn the language to the best of my abilities making strides each day. Ever-moving towards my goal of language proficiency.
Addendum
Code
The code for NS2000 can be found here.