Ja, jag talar svenska hela bra, ja! Bork bork bork!

[pne]

I wonder how I would fare if I were plunked down in Sweden for a while (say, half a year or more).

I understand a little Swedish, at least in writing, and I've been known to fake speaking/writing Swedish myself, but I have little formal knowledge—I just go by the bits and pieces I picked up (or half-remembered snippets thereof) and some educated guessed what the cognate of a German or English word might be. I wonder how quickly I'd acquire the language (with or without formal instruction).

And relatedly: I wonder how I'd do in Denmark or Norway, since for some reason, most of my exposure to "Scandinavian" has been to Swedish. (I presume Faeroese or Icelandic would be right out in terms of my being able to understand much of anything.)

Comments

[edricson.livejournal.com]

(Come to Bergen!)

In fact, I am, for the week before Easter. (completely off-topic - is it very dead or just dead around that time? We didn't want to fly two legs with the baby, so we had to get on a direct flight, which is basically just Oslo which we have seen all of and London for which we don't have a visa, so we're going even at the risk of finding it quite deserted :))

Tromsø does have the feminine, and the nominal morphology is a bit weird from the perspective of the standard Scandinavian languages. There's a place in town called Stakkevollan. It took me about a year to realise that it's not a definite singular à la Swedish (which would be Stakkevolla, except voll is masculine) but rather definite plural...

On the subject of feminine, the story here (http://www.forskning.no/blog/vangsnes/205737) about the double meaning of juli made me smile.