#organizedstudy

Hej!

So it seems like I’m back. My name is Ida and I used to have the blog @organizedstudy but now I’m here @linguenuvolose (cloudy languages). I felt like I needed a fresh start (and my langblr to be my main blog lmao) so here’s my introduction post I guess?

Some facts about me 🌻

I’m turning 22 at the end of the summer

She/her pronouns 

I live in Sweden but I’m debating moving back to Italy soon

I speak Swedish, English, Italian, French and some Dutch

I would really like to learn German, Maltese and Old Norse

I have bachelor’s degree in Italian and wrote my thesis on Italian loanwords in Swedish

I love linguistics, specifically historical and contact linguistics

I really like plants, art history, excel, cross-stitching and going on walks

This blog 🌺

I’ll do my best to make this blog a fun mix of languages, culture and linguistics! I’ll throw it back to some 2016 langblr shit with vocab lists and sharing my progress and I really hope this new start will make me start studying languages some more again. If you have any questions, post suggestions or requests please feel free to send an ask!

I also have an Instagram and a YouTube channel

Okay so I haven’t really watched TV regularly in like 6 years so I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask. I think Sweden has more reality TV than soap operas. (On Wikipedia there’s a list of Swedish soap operas but they’re all pretty old. I’d say Rederiet, Andra Avenyn and Varuhuset are/were the most popular/the ones I immediately recognized even if I haven’t seen them). For some reality TV I recommend checking out the Wikipedia article on that. But yeah, I don’t think we have any series that is THE soap opera right now unfortunately. For places where you can watch Swedish media I recommend SVTplay (you can filter on what is visible from abroad) and dplay (I’ve used it once but I think it’s mostly free and you can watch things from abroad). 

Hej! 

I think getting the pronunciation right is important, especially vowels can be tricky. We have a lot of vowel sounds and I recommend looking at the Swedish phonology page on Wikipedia and try to use the vowel quadrilateral to understand where in the mouth the vowels are pronounced. There are also a lot of youtube videos you can watch and repeat after. Also Forvo is good for hearing the pronunciation of single words.

For word definitions I recommend svenska.se, it has 3 different dictionaries, SAOL and SO being the ones you should look at for current day language and declination of words. SAOB (the one in the right column is a historical dictionary which is interesting but has another use). All of these dictionaries are monolingual and I don’t know of that many English-Swedish ones but I usually use Wiktionary.

Ordklasser.se is also completely in Swedish but it has great information and exercises about things like word classes and phrase analysis. 

Online there’s of course the free resources Duolingo and Memrise even though the Swedish Duolingo lady was an awful pronunciation. 

I know a lot of people use the Rivstart books but I have no personal experience of those.

And lastly, here is the Swedish tag on my blog, if you scroll back a bit I should have a couple of vocab lists and stuff like that there!

Hi! Idk if I’m the best person to ask since I constantly mix in Italian in my French haha. My problem is that my Italian has grown very strong and is often getting in the way when I’m speaking French/studying Latin in one way or another. 

A solution I’ve been doing a little (and want to try more) is to ladder my French from Italian. That means I’d study French through Italian resources. The resource, being designed for native speakers of your stronger TL, will explicitly point out the things that are tricky, false friends etc. and will highlight when things are (exactly) the same so you know what not to stress about. (I know there often are way more resources for many languages in English but check out resources in other languages you know too!) Doing this I can see the languages’ differences and similarities side by side much easier. Like, I know the verb “espérer que” doesn’t take the subjunctive because I know “sperare che” does. (In this house we love us some contrastive grammar)

I guess what I’m trying to say is use your knowledge of other languages to your advantage! If you find one language is getting mixed with another, try to find a pattern in what gets mixed up and focus on solving that by comparing it to your other TL. (I had a period when I always accidentally said “ma” instead of “mais” in French so now I pay more attention to that to actively correct it.)

I hate to say it but my personal experience has also showed me that... you should have an intermediate level in your TL before starting a new one (especially if it’s similar). I studied some German last year and... it immediately started messing with my A1/A2 Dutch. So if you can avoid that I think that’s the best way to go. (Also idk what it is with German but when I picked Latin back up this winter and studied vocab I always wanted “or” to be “oder” ahah).