Language progress
Mar. 8th, 2008 06:53 pmAnother trip to present the Stockholm Progressive group to a small provincial Jewish community yesterday, this time in Uppsala. It was a fairly exhausting evening, hard work but I think productive.
( itinerant preacher )
Since old Polish guys generally have less English than native Swedes, we were using a kind of muddle of English and Swedish (with some Russian and Yiddish thrown in for good measure and Polish for comic effect). There was much general encouragement for me to attempt Swedish, and since the group are almost all immigrants or children of immigrants, they were very firm in pointing out that I would never improve unless I got over my self-consciousness about my flawed speaking. So I was managing mostly in Swedish, even with several people talking at once about quite complex topics. I had to fumble for vocab a few times, but I was certainly communicating. So when it came to drawing the group together to make grace after the meal, I staunchly carried on and made the announcement in Swedish. So that's the first time I've done that, actually made a public speech (albeit a fairly short one) to an audience in Swedish rather than just one-to-one conversation. That feels like a big step forward!
( itinerant preacher )
Since old Polish guys generally have less English than native Swedes, we were using a kind of muddle of English and Swedish (with some Russian and Yiddish thrown in for good measure and Polish for comic effect). There was much general encouragement for me to attempt Swedish, and since the group are almost all immigrants or children of immigrants, they were very firm in pointing out that I would never improve unless I got over my self-consciousness about my flawed speaking. So I was managing mostly in Swedish, even with several people talking at once about quite complex topics. I had to fumble for vocab a few times, but I was certainly communicating. So when it came to drawing the group together to make grace after the meal, I staunchly carried on and made the announcement in Swedish. So that's the first time I've done that, actually made a public speech (albeit a fairly short one) to an audience in Swedish rather than just one-to-one conversation. That feels like a big step forward!
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}