I Had Been Learning Swedish
for a couple of months and one day I was taught a lesson which has changed the way I have been thinking about grammar ever since.
I, very cleverly I may say, used three types of past tense in my first sentence there. Did you spot them?
I had been learning = pluskvamperfekt.
I was taught = preteritum.
I have been thinking = perfekt.
These concepts exist in English grammar too but I’ve no idea what they’re called. Can you see that they’re all past tenses but somehow they’re different? If you’re a fluent English (or Swedish) speaker, they’re all versions of past tenses which you’d run through with no thought whatsoever but there is a difference!
Plusvamperfekt = the event happened in the past of the past. As in I’m telling you a story about the past, but in that story this event was already in the past. It’s over now but it probably affected the story I’m telling you otherwise I wouldn’t be mentioning it.
Preteritum = The event happened in the past. Unless I put a time stamp on it, it’s the event that happened which is important, not how or why it happened.
Perfekt = It started in the past but it either continues now or it’s such a recent past that it’s still affecting the now.
In Swedish, if you’re using the two perfekt tenses then you have to use the supinum form of a verb but if it’s just the regular past tense then you just use the preteritum form. We have it in English too, but I’ve no idea of the grammar names for us. Compare the verb to go vs the Swedish att går:
Present: I go. Jag går.
Preteritum: I went. Jag gick.
Pluskvamperfekt: I had gone. Jag hade gått.
Perfekt: I have gone. Jag har gått.
So in this story - which I promise is actually related to personal finance…
I’d just passed a test and moved up to the next level, but within a matter of days the whole SFI system was uprooted and my new teacher was plucked from us and deposited in a new school with literally no notice (maybe the teacher had some, I don’t know, it was a chaotic time, they made most people redundant, did I tell you how disorganised this place is?! Anyway…).
We had a substitute teacher, who it turned out had no teaching qualifications but was a nice, gentle, retired guy who just wanted to help out a bit. So, we’d been learning the verbs in the past, present and future forms and I was quite happy with that. This one day he plonks infront of us a grid with five columns, loads of rows and some random verbs scattered here and there. He told us to fill out all the different forms of the verb in the correct columns.
So I can fill out the past, present and future but I have not a single clue what the other columns - supinum and imperativ are about. Not a clue! And I was mad. Big mad. Like unable to speak because I know I’ll just cry in frustration mad.
Firstly, like, this isn’t teaching.
But secondly, we’d already learned about the tenses and I got it. There were three and you use them in slightly different ways and some of them make sense and follow rules about how the forms change and others don’t but you just have to get over it. Why make things more complicated now??
The way I think this fits into finance…
I speak English fluently. I don’t think about grammar often (you can probably tell…) but my guess is that for the most part I get it mostly right. I know about past, present and future tenses but I have no recollection of learning perfect tenses and therefore literally didn’t even know they existed even though I was happily using them. It’s not until I was looking at it from a different perspective that I realised the complexity of the stuff I take for granted every day.
I was perfectly happy with the standard three tenses. To me it represented how much I’d already learned - I’m not a language person - so to go from 0% to knowing three forms of maybe 30 verbs plus some adjectives, pronouns, finally learning what a verb and a noun are, well, that’s something pretty special. Now you’re gonna tell me that the incredible feat I’ve just achieved is actually like 5% of very little?? I was proud of where I’d got to and felt like I was being judged, or maybe shamed, for not knowing more and it made me switch off (I wasn’t, it was in my head, the schools are bad here but they’re not that bad…).
You can get quite far, having basic conversations and making yourself known, with even the very basic three concepts even if there is a lot more to learn.
There’s always more to learn, concepts build up quickly and you have a lot of life experience to cement the new stuff to (my English is a really solid basis to compare with Swedish grammar).
Teaching is a skill. Some people have it and some people don’t have it. Find the people that jive with your style.
I hope you’re jiving with my style. I wonder if you thought you’d be reading about Swedish grammar when you first poked your nose into personal finance??
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Love Eleanor. xxx
P.s. If you were wondering what I was making in the reel, it’s the start of quick pickled cucumbers which are an essential part of a Swedish meatball meal.
