Native Speaker
Many want to learn a foreign language with a professor who is a member of the people of the language. There’s a myth that you have to have a teacher who’s native if you want to learn Swedish well. The pronunciation of the Swedish language is not easy for most people, but with a lot of exercise it can be mastered to a very high level.
Especially today when so many media and digital tools are available to you. Practicing pronunciation is repetition, repetition, and relentless repetition. You have speaking exercises and a bunch of applications that are a huge and sufficient help.
Pronunciation is only one part of language learning, but you need grammar, writing, reading and speaking speech with the best possible pronunciation, but most live their personal and professional lives perfectly without insanely perfect pronunciation.
For all adult students, I have one message that comes from biology. If you start learning a foreign language after an early age, it will be very difficult for you to reach the level of a native speaker unless that language is very close to your mother tongue. There is simply a “ramp” in your brain at the language learning center that goes down after 15-17 years. Until then, you can learn a foreign language as a mother tongue, but after that it is difficult.
I know that very well from personal experience. I started learning Russian as a child at the age of 10 and at the age of 14 I fell into the hands of a master! My Russian teacher was not Russian, but she taught me Russian in such a way that I was absolutely bilingual. When I first traveled to Moscow at the age of 23, Russian guides heard me speak and thought I was their colleague asking me if a group from Odessa had arrived.
When I explained to them that I was a student in Yugoslavia and a tourist, they couldn’t believe it … Later I learned English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Swedish, but I didn’t get perfect like in Russian.
And you know what? No one ever corrected me and everyone understood me wherever I spoke all those languages.
Then, for God’s sake, why do you have to speak every language as if it were your mother tongue? Unless you are an actor and even then you can get roles that cannot be a native speaker because you are playing foreigners.
You do not have to. It is enough to approach the level to speak without mistakes, grammatically correct, with a rich vocabulary and for everyone to understand you perfectly.
I am not a native speaker and I have learned the language so well that I work as a Swedish teacher and have been teaching foreigners from all meridians for 12 years.
My 12000 lessons are one of the references but my alumni are the best. If you want to learn something, anything, then choose a master who has already gone the way you need to go. This is professionally called “tacit” knowledge. It is not in the books, it can only be conveyed to you by the
master himself.
This path contains curves, shortcuts, tactics and ingenuity that a native speaker may or may not know. But I know them. They are connected with the culture of the language and with your personality and with your experiences and all the knowledge you possess.
You will speak Swedish the way you normally do other things in life. My grandmother said that a man who learns to do one thing very well – is able to learn anything else he wants if he decides to do so and knows why he wants to.
Many of my friends love how I cook. How could I not know when I spent years in my grandmother’s kitchen helping her and watching what she was doing.
You know what the secret is? She loved doing it above all else. She taught me that eating is one of the sacred magical and most beautiful things – to cook with love for those you love. I was 48 when I came to Stockholm.
I never spoke or listened to Swedish nor was I interested. When I came from the airport to my friend’s apartment and dropped my suitcase on TV, the report began – daily news. I sat down and listened to the speaker for half an hour as if hypnotized and finally cried!
Well I’m not normal! Where did I get the idea to move here and live in this language when I don’t understand a single word!
My friend tried to calm me down by saying: Okay, let’s have a coffee. Tomorrow we go on a city tour and then you will enroll in a language school. If after three months you still want to move to an English – speaking area, I will help you.
So it was. I liked the city. Elegant clean beautiful buildings without graffiti, wide sidewalks, lots of greenery, a bunch of ponds, long walking paths and silence. A beautiful silence in which you hear your own thoughts. I love music and in Sweden I learned to love silence as much as music. I went to school every day for 4 hours. After school, I went to the library, and in the evening I read the subtitles aloud so that my friend would correct me if I was wrong.
I studied, studied, repeated, studied, went to school and private lessons and finished in three months A1, A2, B1 and B2.
Did I go to live in an English speaking area? No. I fell in love with Sweden. And that contributed to me enrolling in Swedish studies and in three years I would enter my old classroom but as a teacher!
I have to admit that it wasn’t my plan but my mentor Katarina thought it would be a shame not to teach because I speak it great and have great general knowledge and the power and charisma to attract students. “You are constantly surrounded by people to whom you say and explain something, it is a gift and you can see that you enjoy it. So let’s do it for a salary!”
What a typical Swedish simplicity, efficiency, purposefulness. Then I completed my already huge education with a master’s degree, got a license for teaching Swedish and went to the classroom. Less than two years passed from watching the news after the airport to entering the classroom full of my first students, and to the license and the first contract on permanent engagement 3 and a half.
What is the secret of my success? Work, learning, constant focus… but how?
I fell in love with one language, one culture, one country. The key, the fifth element, the greatest secret is always – in love.
I remember one walk when the great poet Wolfgang Von Goethe came to my mind and said that he had two homelands – Germany, where he was born, and Italy, which he fell in love with. Ah how wonderful it is to share the experience of the same, unusual experience with one such genius! Every torment that leads to such a goal ceases to be torment in the memory. It becomes an anecdote.
I have told this story to many of my students and they have been very motivated and I have always been one of my favorite teachers. Would you like me to teach you Swedish even though I am not a native speaker?
