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In today's language adventure news, the survival phrases in Swedish audio book gets "Please" wrong, and repeats "Tak" ("Thank you").

It's a dialectal difference perhaps? Because otherwise i don't even know how one could make that mistake. It undermines my confidence in listening to the rest of the recording.

I note my temptation to rely on Google to be the definitive source for the translation. Oh the subtleties of idiom! "Jag är ledsen" is the translation of "I'm sorry" (from a phrase list, which is confirmed by Google). "Förlåt!" however is Google's translation of "Sorry!" (where i added the exclamation point to be sure that it is the translation of "Ooops, i didn't mean to do that-sorry!" not "You just told me something that makes you sad, I'm sorry."

In writing up my genealogy notes, i translated several paragraphs through google, going from English to Swedish and back to English, changing the source English until it lacked challenging idiomatic phrases.

I realize just how weak my listening skills are as i wonder why anyone would learn numbers as part of survival phrases. "I have fingers!" I think. But most people probably expect to understand the words they hear. I have curious issues with listening to others. It's not i am hard of hearing, but i am hard of parsing, if that makes sense.

This is such a distraction from what i should be doing: preparing for the conference.

I do hope that Mom's appointment is not as painful as my body seems to be making it out. (Although that may be travel and conference and public speaking stress.) ( Read more... )