Learning a language it is beneficial to listen to and sing along to music in that language. You learn new words but more importantly you get a sense of the rhythm and intonation of the language, as well as learning pronunciation.
Below is a link to a popular summer song in Swedish, by Tomas Ledin. It is called “Sommaren är kort” – summer is short.
To learn the Swedish language by listening to music you need to pick up the words in the song. I have made a Sommaren är kort – glosor translating Swedish into English.
Do you want to know how a word in a foreign language is pronounced? I found a website – Acapela – ; providing native speaking voices for 30 different languages; often also different local dialects. I tried Swedish and it worked well. So go ahead and listen to pronunciation of Swedish.
A year after repatriation I took an on-line course on creative writing. As an expat I had embarked on the e-learning journey and I enjoyed – and still do – partaking in classes from the comfort of my own home. In the middle of the night. One of the tasks was to write an engaging poem. I had never written such a thing in my life; it´s not really my cup of tea, or at least so I thought. But I knew exactly from where to get the inspiration – the first cold and wet, dark, months back in Sweden. So I wrote. And I cried. The words flowed and at the same time evoked such strong feelings. Apparently in the teacher too. I received high praise. She commented it might be about suicide though – referring to darkness, cold and that it didn’t have to be. Eh … no. Only about the weather. ;/
