General Introductions Post

[viklikesfic]

Welcome to language_learning!

This is a general post where we can introduce ourselves and meet those who speak or are studying the languages we want to learn. As the community grows, I will add language-specific posts geared towards matching people up with conversation partners, but let's start here and find out who on DW is learning a language!

Suggested format (feel free to modify at will):

Name you prefer:
Location:
Home country:
Languages you speak/sign/read/understand:
Languages you have studied or are studying:
Current language learning goals:
Favorite language learning tool or resource:
Would you like others who are learning or speak your target languages to add/contact you?:

Comments

[bronzed]

Name you prefer: bronzed
Location: Örebro, Sweden
Home country: Canada
Languages you speak/sign/read/understand: English (raised in Canada thus am first an english speaker), French (studied 12 years in school, used to be fluent but must try a bit harder now) and Swedish (completely fluent since moving here 4 years ago).
Languages you have studied or are studying:
I kind of answered this above. I learned French over the course of 12 years in school in Canada, so its Canadian French not Parisian French. And then age 26 I moved to Sweden, studied Swedish for 10 months after marrying my Swede husband and am now fully fluent. Frankly nobody can believe I learned so fast as Swedish is a fairly difficult language to learn (in the top 10 I read somewhere for native English speakers).
Current language learning goals: Improve my Swedish as much as possible so I can someday write a book in Swedish as well as English, and to get back all the French I lost when I learned Swedish.
Favorite language learning tool or resource: Its absolutely the Lexin, for quick translations from about 15 languages into Swedish found here: http://lexin2.nada.kth.se/sve-eng.html (translates from among many: english, albanian, arabic, bosnian, finnish, greek, croatian, persian, russian, serbian, spanish and more)
Would you like others who are learning or speak your target languages to add/contact you?: Theyre 100% welcome and invited to contact me about anything and all things English or Swedish, not so much in French, I think I am losing my touch there.

[viklikesfic]

Welcome! I'm not surprised that Swedish is up there on the difficult languages list. I'm studying Danish and it's the same idea; fortunately I do have a knack for mimicking pronunciation so I use one of the Teach Yourself audio programs and I'm picking it up pretty quickly.

[marshtide]

Ha, I've recently moved to Sweden to live with my partner and am about to start studying through SFI (though I've been self-teaching since some time last year, in a slow sort of way - it's got a lot faster since I moved), so I guess I'm in a similar situation but a few years behind! An awfully long way to go to fluency for me, though I'm rather surprised that it's meant to be so tough for English-speakers - I've not been finding it too bad, and certainly easier than French. (But then French and I have a peculiarly antagonistic relationship which left me thinking for years that I simply couldn't learn languages...)