I Can’t Speak Swedish
I can’t. Really. Yes, I went to a Swedish Lutheran college in Minnesota (and as a result I can pull off Frances McDormand’s Minnesotan accent from Fargo with aplomb), but the only language I took there was a semester of Spanish. I had two years of French in high school. I do know a few random Swedish phrases thanks to hanging out in my college’s Swedish House for a lot of my last two years and from being a four year veteran of the Lucia Singers, who sang the same Sankta Lucia song every December on Lucia Day. I’m also pretty good at picking through websites in foreign languages to find whatever I need. It’s a holdover from my last job where, depending on the project or the day, I might have to pretend to be fluent in Romanian or Arabic or Korean without ever speaking any one of those languages.
Neither of these skills make me actually, truly fluent in Swedish. In the slightest.
And yet yesterday I got emails asking what a particular Swedish word meant in English, and today I spent half my morning “translating” a website to see if there’s any information we could use on it. That was an interesting experience. I’m getting really familiar with one of the Swedish-English dictionary sites.
It’s enough to make a girl consider taking the language or getting the Rosetta Stone software, just in self-defense.