Day 2061: How to lose Swedes and alienate people

Have you ever heard someone say that it's hard to make friends in Sweden? It's a commonly held idea. Year upon year Sweden ranks bottom in international surveys of immigrants for making new friends and if you are one such immigrant it's a sure fire phrase to get a conversation going among fellow foreigners. Everyone has anecdotes about their attempts to make friends. Last month in a seminar at university, a Swedish girl told a Greek boy in the class "I saw you on the bus last week, but I thought eh, and I sat further back" which basically means "I saw you and I avoided you because I couldn't be bothered to make conversation for the whole bus journey". Now I have definitely avoided people I sort of know on the bus. But what is key, and I can't stress this enough, is that I DON'T tell that person that I deliberately avoided them.

A lot of really uninformed people get on their soapboxes and shout that not knowing Swedish is a key barrier to making friends.  One of the reasons I decided to study full time for the last two years - in Swedish - was because, at least in England, university is an excellent place for meeting likeminded people. So far I've made one firm friend, who's Malaysian. And I met her on one of the seminars that was taught in English. Sometimes the Swedish seminars were bordering on painful in terms of social interaction. Obviously some facet of Swedish sociality is beyond me. Where am I going wrong? I have a few ideas.

1. I talk "in other people's mouths" (tala i munnen på varandra)

Swedes are really, really loathe to speak on top of each other. "Att prata i munnen på varandra är sällan vägen till ett lyckat samtal," apparently. Of course, it's quite confrontational to talk over someone. If you do it at the wrong time, they'll feel like you hijacked what they were saying or maybe weren't even listening to begin with. It's also domineering, to think that what you have to say is worth overtaking another person's input. Now we're stepping on the toes of the big Swedish No-No, namely jantelagen (everyone is equal). You're not better than your conversation partner, so why are you talking over them?

Well, here's why: because you're showing that you are keen, interested, genuinely involved, brimming with ideas! Timing is key here, you don't want to completely cut off the other person mid-flow. The aim is to rejuvenate the topic as that person is coming to the end of their idea, or build upon what they've said, or supply a word they're floundering after. If the person talking has repeated themselves multiple times already and the rest of the group is losing interest, please for the love of god, cut them off and take the conversation elsewhere. At the other end of the spectrum, people, no matter what they say, do not want the conversation to lapse into silence. They don't want to be the conversation killer. Save them by picking up the tail end of what they've been saying.


2. I'm not "med i föreningen"

Actually I am. I'm in several groups. But they're not the right ones. I tried to join a badminton förening but they are all completely, completely full and frustratingly opaque about annual recruitment. The best way to join a förening is to know someone who is already in the förening. I joined, you guessed it, a (really great, by the way) badminton group full of immigrants. In my first few years here I was in a Swedish conversation group with no Swedes. I set up a French conversation group and some Swedes came, I tried to get them to stay an hour and speak a bit of Swedish; they did not. Many organisations are very insular and cliquey, often consisting of groups of people who have already known each other a while from outside the förening. As one migrant put it, 'Only in Sweden have I ever been told ‘I don't need to talk to you, I have enough friends'. Even if you are in a group and you meet Swedes there, like my book group for example, you'll most likely never see each other outside the designated group times.

3. My Swedish is rude

After the Stockholm marathon I was waiting for a train with my boyfriend when a runner wearing a medal walked past. "Grattis!" I said (congratulations). When he'd walked out of earshot, my boyfriend told me I sounded really sarcastic. Unless you put the right nuance and intonation into what you say, perhaps you are not really saying what you think you are saying.  God knows how many times I've sounded like a total bitch because of my word choice or lack of nuance. A lot of Swedish sounds completely saccharine and overbearingly false to me in much the same way that American English does to my British ears. "Åh vad häääääärligt, gud vad bra". Fuck off.

I state opinions (bad), I swear (in Swedish: bad. In English: helt ok), I talk about the class divide (awkward) and I disagree with people (social suicide).

4. I do not live in a flatshare; I do not work with Swedes

We spend a lot of time at work. We spend a lot of time at home. If you share those two places with Swedish people, the probability of you meeting some is substantially higher than if you don't. The only Swede in my workplace is my boss, who is awesome - in a professional sort of way. She's definitely not my friend. The only Swede in my home is my boyfriend and, well, he's already trapped and has nowhere to run.

5. I don't want to talk about Britain

Wow - are Swedes complete Anglophiles. Swedish people are so incredibly interested in Britain, they speak English, they read about it in the news, they watch BBC, they don't dub anything, they invite British comedians over, they take regular trips over there, they study over there in droves, they talk about London like a second home, and as soon as they hear my accent they want to talk to me in English about Downton Abbey. But...I hate Downton Abbey.  I don't want to talk about the queen, I'd rather get rid of the whole bollocks royal affair. I'll talk to you about Brexit if you really, really want...but then you have to be prepared for the rudeness I mentioned in (3). Plus, it's frankly bewildering. Do these Anglophile Swedes realise that most Brits think Sweden is Switzerland?

6. I don't know who the fuck Mikael Persbrandt is...

...And I think I wouldn't care even if I did. Come to mention it, I don't watch Swedish TV and I don't know who any of the so called "celebrities" are. Charlotte Perelli who? Parneviks what? Is Jonas Gardell even funny any more? I went to see Eddie Izzard once in Sweden and they billed me a 3 hour show, only 30 minutes of which was Izzard and the other painful hours were filled with literally THE WORST "comedy" I have ever seen, it was sickeningly, cringeworthily bad. Thank god it was in Swedish so Eddie Izzard couldn't understand how dreadful it was. One section of the show consisted of two women saying cunt over and over again to show how modern their comedy was. Still, I think I'd rather see that again that watch Melodifestivalen (the long, drawn-out preamble to the twattery that is the Eurovision song contest). When Swedes start bandying the names of Z-list celebrities around in conversation it really is time for me to get my coat. If Pewdiepie is your country's highest grossing cultural export then something's definitely going wrong in the art factory.

7. I'm neither here nor there

I'm sure many other people would agree with me when I say that when you leave one country and move to another, after a while you don't really fit in either. It becomes more challenging to maintain friendships with people who come from one place, relate to one place, speak passionately about one place and are unequivocally invested emotionally and socially in one place. Yes, that one place is important to me too, but I've got divided loyalties. I take comfort and support from other immigrants just like me who understand my divided loyalties. So, I work hard at my friendships with people in England and I keep an open mind about friendships appearing with Swedes, but more often than not the Swedes who end up with foreign friends have lived abroad themselves, and they too are two parts (or more!) of one whole. On the positive side, a recent study showed that having friends who are different from you makes you a better, more adaptable person.

Day 1012: Give us this day our daily sourdough

England has some really, really shite bread. The number one brand is Kingsmill but it's certainly not eaten by royalty and it's probably not really a mill, either. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the Kingsmill factory was just a room full of newspapers, wood shavings and disgruntled workers shoving small quantities of these into moulds before injecting them with air and dipping them into vats of bleach until the resulting product is so white you could squish several loaves together into a human shape, leave it on a beach somewhere in Alicante and have people assume it was an average British person. But hey, you are what you eat. Such is the nature of food culture in England that "healthy bread" means the same old shit that you used to eat but with a spattering of bran, not too much though or, heaven forbid, the kids will find out what real food looks like.

Some people try to convince themselves that they are actually healthy by buying brown bread, because they heard some spiel somewhere about whole grains. But companies in the UK are ahead of the curve on that one, and sell regular old white bread with a handful of other shit thrown in to make it LOOK like it's brown. "It's got 900 kinds of seeds in it! Wow!" Yeah...but is it brown? Is it fuck.

It is actually possible to buy wholemeal bread though, and you know it's the real deal because it's got a giant heart on it, in case you missed the memo about WHOLE WHEAT AND YOUR HEART. DID YOU KNOW IT'S GOOD FOR YOU, YEAH? But even if it didn't have a heart on it, you would know it was the healthy option because, just like brown rice and brown pasta, it offers not even a hint of the enjoyment of the unhealthy option and the eating experience is very much like gnawing desperately on an MDF table at 8am when the breakfast hunger pangs take you.

You might as well just give up and go for a bread that is totally devoid of any content whatsoever and designed entirely around toasting and slathering with butter (and this is England so I really mean it, get that knife in that butter block, or just, fuck it, put the whole butter slab on the toast and then add half a jar of Robinson's jam)

Sweden on the other hand, well, there is no other hand. In this respect England and Sweden really are similar. Sweden can boast as much as it likes about its class equality (most poor choices about food are linked to lack of understanding about good food, or economic inability to buy good food) but all that means is that theirs is a nation of people who really should know better about bread and who still buy the same old shit that their British neighbours do.

They also seem to fall for the same marketing tricks, believing that additional items ground into the loaf somehow magically make it more, well, magical. Like root vegetables. When have you ever been struck by the thought that your bread is missing something and that thing...is ROOT VEG?

Even if sometimes the bread comes in a different shape here, don't be fooled! It's still full of sugar. In England the bread is full of salt, some loaves have more than a gram per slice, but over here it's all about the syrup and the sugar. I confess I do enjoy a good rye or wheat cake, but I should have known what I was getting myself into when I saw the word cake...sugar by the bucketload!

This post was inspired by my search for a new daily bread, since moving to a new city we no longer have access to the delicious bread that was made in small, local factory that did its own deliveries. Now it's all about the big supermarkets and their big selection of SHITE. Everything is either bad, sourdough or a combination of the two with something experimental thrown in. Ah yes, sourdough. That's a big trend here. Everything is sourdough all the time. Especially when you don't particularly want sourdough. Here have some sourdough, it wouldn't be a complete blog post about Swedish bread without some.

Day 838: Swedish English Learning

What happens if you think you're better at something than you actually are?

I recently attended a conference for English teachers in Stockholm and by far and away the most interesting piece of information I took away from the event was this: Swedish school students' motivation for learning English is low because they think they are already good at English and they don't need to study it at school.

It's a commonly accepted fact that Swedes are good at English. If you come here on a visit and can't even manage a "Hej" or a "Tack" you won't have too many difficulties getting around and about. Sometimes you'll meet someone who'll explain that they're "terribly sorry for my lack of English" and use a whole host of words you would never use yourself in doing so. You also meet Swedes who take the piss out of other Swedes speaking "terrible" English while you smile on, and nod, thinking about your own, utter lack of Swedish.

But while it's all well and good being able to communicate with people on an everyday level, a sad truth about English is that when it comes to certain situations, be they academic, business related or formal events, the language is a total bitch to master. More than this, if you're not a native speaker (and let's face it, sometimes even if you are a native speaker) there are times when you won't use a subjunctive, or a whom, or a pronoun, or some other finicky piece of shit word, and your fabulous idea suddenly won't pack the punch that it's supposed to.

This is in fact true of all languages, of course, but the particular problem with having English as your second language is that you're up against a globalised world full of millions, perhaps billions, of other people using English to reach out to the English speaking world in the best way possible. If you end up in a job which requires you to write formal, or academic, or business, or sales, or any of the other myriad forms of English then you'll either be glad that you had the chance to learn these things or spend a lot of frustrated time trying to do it as an adult. And I'm all for the adaptation of language over time, and the natural changes that come through regular use, but I don't think there's any escaping the need to use the language "correctly" according to the currently accepted model. If you write an academic paper with no apostrophes whatsoever, your reader is going to ask you where they are, instead of thanking you for pioneering a new form of apostrophe-less English.

Where am I going with this? Well, in the study which I was shown at this conference, the presenter (a very interesting academic called Alastair Henry, whose research can be found here) explained that motivation in class comes from a variety of sources. One of these sources is the perceived gap between how good the learner thinks they are at the current moment, and how good they think they will be in the future. If this gap is big, then students accept that they have some work to do and feel motivated to do it. If the gap is small, then the students feel no pressure to work hard, since they think they don't have too far to go. What does this have to do with Sweden? As part of the study, the results from Swedish students were compared with several other countries:

The numbers in the first red circle, under the r, show the mean size of the gap between how good students ranked themselves currently and how good they think they want to be in the future. Sweden's average was .34, which is almost half as small as the next smallest gap in Iran at .62. This basically means, as I already said, that Swedish teenagers think they're nearly the fucking DON at English and that they don't have to do anything because they're only .34 away from being the actual fucking DON at English.

Why do they think this? They think this because:
a) On average they spend >20 hours a week interacting with English on the internet or in games or on TV etc
b) They are actually quite good. I work in a lot of schools and when kids find out I'm English they follow me around and talk to me because they want to show off.
c) Sometimes they can express themselves better in English than in Swedish. Some kids asked a colleague of mine "how do you say 'coincidence' in Swedish?" in English in the middle of a Swedish speaking exam.

Why is it dangerous to think this?
a) Because you're never the fucking DON of a language. There is always more to learn and more to write and more to read. Unless you're J.R.R. Tolkien, then I'm happy to call you the fucking DON of English (although I'm sure he'd agree with what I just said, being an academic)
b) Because the kids I teach might be able to talk fluently and express some complex ideas but they sound like Jessie Pinkman from Breaking Bad all the while
c) Because as much as I like and use them, there are more adjectives, modifiers, verbs and just general vocabulary than just "shit" "bullshit" "motherfucking" "fucking" "poop" "fuck" "dick" and "ass".

The advice of Alastair Henry at this conference was something which all teachers should know and do all the time, but which in any case bears repeating, essentially it is the job of the teacher to show the student a different future self, one which is a bit further away from that which the student has created for him or herself. This future self can achieve more and be even better that the one which the student imagined and can inspire motivation.

No motherfucking pressure then. Poop.