10 days of intense Swedish: day 9

In an attempt to bring up my Swedish comprehension level, I’ve been trying a little experiment. I’m trying to see how much time I can put in over a 10 day period, focusing on Listening-Reading. Using English text and Swedish audio, I’m studying at least 5 hours per day, and trying for more. While not for the faint of heart, this method suits me right now because I have a block of spare time, so I can throw all of my effort into this project. So far, after 8 days I’ve done 44.5 hours of studying in this fashion. Today is day 9.

I’ve discovered two difficulties. One is obviously to do with time. If I waste 15 minutes every hour chatting with people on the internet and surfing web pages, then it’s actually quite a significant fraction of my daily time, even though it seems insignificant in the moment. On the day where I tried the hardest, it took me over 15 hours to get 10 hours of productivity, but on most days it was far less than that. That extreme day meant that I only got up to cook/eat/shower, and I didn’t even leave my apartment the entire day. Not very sustainable, but it was interesting.

Incidentally, I also thought it would be easy to get 8 hours of productivity in, because it’d be similar to an office work-day. I found out, however, that in any 8 hour period of a “work-day”, not all of it is productive time. Trying quite hard, I’d be lucky to get 6 hours of productivity over that 8 hour period, which I suspect is actually far more than I ever did at a real job. It’s really hard to stay on-task for that length of time.

The next problem is attention. While raw time is important, its value will vary depending on how much attention you can pay to the various language features you encounter. While Listening-Reading, I noticed that sometimes I would get absorbed in the English text and block out the Swedish audio, and other times I was only half-listening to the Swedish audio, but not trying super hard to pick out every single word and come up with the meanings.

Overall I found this method quite satisfying. I fully understood everything since I was reading in English, but I was also picking up a lot of new Swedish words from the audio. So far I’ve read John Boyne’s The boy in the striped pyjamas (“Pojken i randig pyjamas”), Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (“Alkemisten”), Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and most of Stieg Larsson’s The girl with the dragon tattoo (“Män som hatar kvinnor”).

One thing I’d prefer in the future is to use parallel texts, where each sentence or paragraph of English is matched up with the transcript of the target-language audio. This would be vital for starting a language from scratch, I think, but I managed without it this time because of my previous experience with Swedish using other study methods. I haven’t created parallel texts yet for my Swedish books because I’ve had a lot of problems finding PDFs of the Swedish text online, so I’ve had to settle for my regular Swedish paperbacks. I have some tentative plans in the near future to try this method from scratch for other languages, and for those I’ll definitely be using line-by-line parallel texts.

I’m continuing today, after I get a few things done in the real world. I’m enjoying my new apartment here in Berlin, but I still have to buy some vital things like a fridge. It’s fun to ignore the world and study Swedish all day, but responsibilities sometimes intervene.

I should be able to easily reach 50 hours total by the end of my 10-day study period, but I also hope that I can raise that to 100 hours by the end of the month. Hopefully that should put me on pretty firm ground in Swedish, and I’ll be able to continue my studying a little bit more casually by just reading a lot of books whenever I have the chance.

contact precedes comprehension

After seeing a recent tweet by Khatsumoto where he says “One can never come to understand native-level material by avoiding it: contact precedes comprehension”, I decided I should weigh in on this. When I’ve suggested reading novels to people, a lot of them are really afraid of the idea. They tell me that they don’t understand enough of the language yet. WELL YA! you haven’t done any reading, of course you don’t understand much yet. I think they have it backwards.

Some people believe that you should have more than 90% understanding of everything before you try to read it, but I think this is nonsense. Even when I barely understand 50% of the words on the page, I’m getting something out of the process of reading and listening to a real novel in whatever language I’m learning. This type of learning cannot be easily counted and quantified; you are learning things not in a clear-cut black-and-white fashion such as “I now know these exact words!”. You are slowly gathering familiarity with many different words.

In the process, you are also seeing many of the most frequent words over and over and over. These really frequent words (usually quite important to the language) are quite easy to get a sense for, even if you understand very few of the other words in the sentences. A lot of the time, if you can just tell whether certain words are probably a noun or probably a verb or probably an adjective, then that can be enough context to learn more about the usage of some other words around them.

After a week of my ongoing experiment in reading lots of Swedish, I’ve found that I know a surprising amount of words already. I had thought that it would benefit me to go through the 2000 word wordlist that I have kicking around, but lately I’m finding that I just already know a lot of it. A few weeks ago, I’d go through one page of it and add almost every example sentence into Anki, but now I really have to search to find new words that I haven’t seen. I’m also able to guess a lot of them more easily now. I’m just becoming much more familiar with Swedish.

This gives me great confidence that I’ll be able to learn a ton just by reading for the next month. Although I saw drastic improvement in German due to reading, somehow I still have this doubt in my mind that I can just learn huge amounts of a language purely by sitting down every day to enjoy a book. I think this is an argument for spending as much time as possible doing it every day, because then the speed of the improvements is much more noticeable, and that helps your motivation.

Anyway, back to the topic. There’s no point in waiting until you already understand most of a language in order to start reading. You need to get used to the idea early that it is greatly beneficial to read native books no matter what level you are at. Maybe you won’t get that much at the start, but keep going and you’ll see that it moves fast. For simple language like small posts on blogs, I can already read Swedish quite well. I was linked to a bike forum called fixedgear.se and I found that I could quite easily read along with the articles and comments. Sure, I’m still learning a lot of new vocabulary from them, but actually reading and understanding their meaning is no longer difficult. This is an effect purely from reading difficult books like real Swedish-language novels, because I couldn’t do this a few weeks ago.

Don’t wait! Immerse yourself now! Why are you reading my silly English blog? You could be out getting exposed to some awesome content in your target language!