Written by Dena
26 Jun 2015
My plans for the summer are simple and nerdy.
I am staying in Lund until mid-July for the sole purpose of learning Swedish. I have taken up an intensive course with classes every day from 8.30 am! The first week went by smoothly but with homework and lots of new words to learn!
The reason I chose to spend half of my summer here studying Swedish is because I feel like the classes I had during the past 7 months did not give me enough knowledge as I thought I would get. They were also quite slow, and way too much English was spoken… A part of me feels like I’ve wasted these 7 months, 5 hours per week doing nothing useful.
I know, in reality, this is not entirely true since I have gone a little bit further in my study of the Swedish language, but not as much as I wanted. I definitely planned for my Swedish to be much better by the end of my first year here.
This is, unfortunately, not a rare occurrence when it comes to SFI (Swedish for immigrants) courses, as groups are usually quite large and the level and pace of people in one group can differ largely, thus obliging teachers to go much slower than planned.
It is a constant struggle and frustration for both students and teachers. However, the courses are free and resources are scarce so I guess it’s the best it can be for the moment, especially taking into consideration the amount of foreigners flocking into Sweden every year.
The course I started this week has been a refreshment, indeed. It is fast-paced, there is no room for slacking and it’s more challenging than the previous ones. So far, so good. I will not attend the whole summer course (it goes on until mid-August) but I will be here for the first half of it and I plan to make the best of those few weeks.
After Swedish, I often go to the law library and read interesting topics I didn’t have time to read during the academic year.
The weather is not nice… I can’t go to the beach just yet and it doesn’t really feel like summer! 🙁
So what are your plans for the summer?
