I wasn’t great at languages (or ‘modern foreign languages’ as it was officially called) in school.
Part of this was circumstantial. I moved cities partway through secondary education, from a school where French was the foreign language of choice to a school where German was, forced into doing a German GCSE with three fewer years of German knowledge than my fellow pupils.
I ended up scraping a D, for Deutsche.
After school, I didn’t really pursue French, German, or any other language. I was bad at them, after all; the education system had said so. Conversely, my highest grades were in English language and literature, which just gave me more reason to double down the one language I was really good at.
But change is afoot!
Last week, I installed the Duolingo app and started learning Swedish. And it’s been… actually really fun! It turns out I’m actually half-decent at learning languages. Who knew?
Part of this is just out of a general desire for self-improvement, of which learning a language is one avenue (another is to exercise more, as was part of my yearly theme before health issues steamrolled everything).
But why Swedish?
- I’ve been to Sweden twice so far this year: Malmö in February and Stockholm in June. Both times I’ve found the language decently easy to pick up, probably because quite a lot of everyday words are similar to their English equivalents.
- They’ve also just generally been really nice places. Malmö especially, as a compact, former industrial port city with a famous bridge and a reputation for being rough around the edges, really speaks to me as a Bristolian.
- The stuff that isn’t like English trends towards being similar to German, which I at least have a rudimentary understanding of.
- I have friends who already speak Swedish, including one of my partners.
- Fluency in English is extremely common in Sweden, so I always have a fallback available to me if I falter in practice.
The more serious reason is that I’m increasingly pessimistic about having a future in the UK.
For the last decade, there’s been a feeling of regression, culturally and economically. Perhaps the thing that has most recently triggered this feeling was the release of this year’s IPSOS LGBT+ Pride report, which shows the UK backsliding on virtually all aspects of gay and transgender rights.
Less and less does this feel like a place where I can be safe or secure. If I cannot be myself while being treated as an equal, if I cannot afford a home without moving a hundred miles away, if the best outcome I can hope for is the maintenance of a (shitty) status quo, then the best thing for my own mental health is just to leave.
I don’t want it to come to that, but I’m tired of hoping. It’s time to join so many of my peers and make an escape plan.
Sweden is that escape plan. So I’m learning the language, just in case I do need to say hej då to the UK some day.