So, Why Are You Learning Swedish?

I've gotten this response a few times when I've mentioned taking Swedish classes this fall "semester" (each class level is 10 sessions, once a week--I've taken 2 so far). It's honestly quite amusing when I manage to surprise people with having taken an interest in such a niche language– the short answer is that I'm simply learning the language for fun.

The longer answer is that I fell in love with Scandinavia when I visited Sweden and Denmark on my trip to Stockholm, Älmhult, and Copenhagen 2 years ago. Furthermore, I was pulled into the IKEA fan club and followed 2 Swedish YouTubers (Pewdiepie and RoomieOfficial) during my youth.

Frankly, I find language learning to be such a powerful hobby to pick up. Each language I learn allows me to be "in" on a few more cultures and niche memes. I have a much easier time connecting with others from different countries when I point out that I listen to music in their language or recognize a piece of their pop culture. I also bond with other language learners when we share languages.

Have I mentioned that I'm trying to be a polyglot?

I've mainly been using Duolingo to learn and practice, but I've always taken some form of course along the way. You can see my "Score on LinkedIn" for some of the languages that I'm focused on in the screenshot below.

To explain these scores and my proficiency, I'll say that some of these are limited by what Duolingo actually offers. The prime example of this is that I'm a heritage Chinese speaker– granted, I started with the Shanghainese dialect, but my ability to understand Mandarin Chinese is higher than my ability to speak it. Plus, I've hit the cap for Duolingo Chinese content to get a score of 60.

With French, I actively maintain it by converting my social media and device languages to default to French, as the last proper French class I took was AP French in the 10th grade. With Korean, I took one Beginner Korean class for a semester in undergrad. With Danish, I picked it up about a year before beginning Swedish because the two were too similar for me to start at the same time. I haven't taken a formal Danish class, but the Scandinavian languages are all quite similar.

It's quite difficult to maintain spoken proficiency as it's mostly a "if you don't use it, you lose it" situation, but literary proficiency is much easier to maintain. This can be done by media consumption. (I listen to a lot of multilingual music.)

Why aren't there more language learners?

There are 368k language learners in the r/languagelearning community on Reddit. I personally think that one of the reasons that language learning is hard is because of the way an individual learns. Some courses are taught in immersion, which can be too overwhelming at times. Others, like Duolingo, suffer from complaints about a lack of grammar instruction.

I also find immersion overwhelming and much prefer self-paced instruction like Duolingo. Through using Duolingo for the past decade, I've also realized that I have a knack for picking up language patterns even without a proper grammar lesson. There's something about the repetition of new vocab words and seemingly random sentences that allows me to find grammar patterns. I easily catch the sentence structure, find the differences between the way prepositions and pronouns are used, and note differences in noun and verb forms, if any.

Wait, so why are you learning so many languages?

Because it's fun.
It might also be useful for my career if I get to a fluent enough conversational level or manage to communicate complex thoughts. But so far, I'm not quite there yet.