Svenskay's Blog

Last few days December 14, 2009

Well, the term has gone fast and it seems like it’s been a while since I’ve updated here. It’s mainly for the lack of blog-worthy events that have been occurring, but there’s still a large part of laziness on my behalf.

The course seems to be going well and I feel I’m slowly understanding a little more each day. I’m even starting to pick out the occasional word from conversations which is a vast improvement from before. All in all, quite proud with my progress.

About two weeks ago we were given a test to do. This was to determine which groups we will be put into next term. After feeling quietly confident about it all this time we finally got the results back today. Out of a total of 75 I managed to get 74! Yay me. The only point I messed up on was a spelling mistake in the word sjuttonde. Having a quick look around to judge how the rest of my classmates had performed, there seemed to be a vast difference in ability. I was never really aware of this before, but maybe that’s just because some people are better at being quiet and going unnoticed than others. I glanced over to another table to notice someone managed to score 4… Maybe I shouldnt judge too harshly, as some students wont even have Roman characters in their first languages, but still… 4…?

Whilst looking around on WordPress for others in a similar situation, I came across a few people mentioning individuals that feign how bad their Swedish is, just so they can stay on the course longer, keep receiving their benefits and avoid working. I would like to think people like this are not commonplace, so  for now I’ll put this down to other reasons. Anyway…

As the teacher handed out the tests she mentioned to me and two others that we were to take another test in the second half of the lesson to determine how much Swedish we know. Maybe she is thinking of putting us into a higher group…? I’ll find out in January I suppose.

The test itself was a lot more difficult than anything we’ve done previously. I did manage to understand the majority of it, which I was pleased with, but I don’t think I’ll be getting anywhere near as good a grade for this one. From what I could work out, one of the questions asked how the fire brigade could tell that a dog which had alerted a family to a fire in their house, was a competent dog… Not what it was asking, methinks… Or would they ask such a strange question? Ah well.

I wonder if we’ll find out how we did. I’m planning on doing another post after term had ended to summarise things so I’ll write about it then if I am told. Until then, I might have a little rest. After all, it is nearly Christmas.