Progress: I have reached level 4 on Duolingo. It's always surprising how quickly the lowest levels of Duolingo go. I expect to reach level 5 by tomorrow. I've been using Swedishpod101, Swedish music, and kids TV shows to get an ear for how the language sounds. I've read through the first chapter of Complete Swedish and listened to the audio. I even started a Swedish course on Memrise (I just went for the most popular Swedish course on there).
On Pronunciation: A lot of coursebooks and other learning tools start with pronunciation. I look at those lists of sounds and become completely baffled and frustrated.
Instead of memorizing pronunciation, I believe in learning pronunciation in context. It is so much easier to remember that kött (meat) is pronounced like "shoht" than to memorize that when k is in front of an ö it makes a "sh" sound.
I do like watching videos about pronunciation - often in the background while I'm doing other Swedish studying (I am one of those people who appreciate background noise). Academia Cervena has a great youtube playlist with a ton of helpful videos, including the one below on pitch accent. The pitch accent one was amazingly interesting and grabbed my full attention. It is a good video to watch at the beginning of my journey into Swedish.
Next up: Reach level 5 of Duolingo, memorize some food words (I've learned them via Duolingo, but have not started to memorize them), make flashcards.
No comments:
Post a Comment