I’m learning Swedish…
And it’s been… interesting.
I’ve never been ‘a languages person’ and it’s been fascinating to try and get over that whilst applying myself to this quite intense task. It turns out I know very little about English grammar (though that wasn’t much of a surprise to me) and I have learned incredible things about my memory and mindset. It’s been a wild ride and I have so much to share, but I’m going to talk on one specific and overwhelming feeling, a time when I felt myself entering the next level of learning which I think couples so perfectly with finance (and anything else probably).
So I go to SFI - Swedish For Immigrants - a state funded programme where immigrants can learn the basics of Swedish reading, writing, listening and speaking. It is very relaxed. And by that I mean incredibly badly run with very little foresight, oversight or planning! However, the teachers are pleasant, the other students have been wonderful and Swedish is honestly a gorgeous language.
So one Friday, our teacher had been double booked to invigilate some exams with no replacement (see what I mean about the planning???), so she set a Swedish film running, with subtitles and left us to it. Many people left and I was considering it, but then I got hooked on the story which was a comedy, set in the current time, about some ageing Soviet era spies trying to find a recipe for a soft drink. I forget the details any further than that but what I didn’t forget was the feeling that I. Understood. What. They. Were. Saying.
Not every single word, but enough of them to follow the movie. It had simply never occurred to me before that I could watch anything over nursery level and expect to understand it. I guess I thought I would at some point but to me, that was so far in the future as to be unknowable. But here I was, understanding it, laughing at the jokes, pondering on some of the plotholes, planning to look up other films in the series. Wild hey?!
So that same day, I went to the cinema and watched a Danish(!!!) film! I do remember the name of this: Flickan med nålen / The Girl With the Needle (they don’t use capital letters like we do which stresses me out…). Danish and Swedish are similar (not quite as similar as Norwegian and Swedish) so to me, who knew very little at the time, they sounded basically the same but there were Swedish subtitles.
That’s a creepy image right?!
It was much darker and more serious, an arty film about a poor woman between the two world wars whose husband is seriously wounded and who gets pregnant by a rich man who then abandons her. She meets a woman who has a business putting unwanted babies up for adoption, gets involved in the business and finds out that the woman is actually killing the children. It was quite difficult to watch actually, but beautifully shot and importantly, I understood this film too! Less than the other one, because the level was so much higher (and it was a different language) but enough to follow and have opinions about it.
Since then, I’ve just bloody watched whatever I want! Most things I understand the majority of. Sometimes I understand every bit and very rarely am I totally lost (although it happens). If it weren’t for that random Friday, where the college that I go to was so terribly disorganised, I might still be diligently making my way through boring grammar exercises.
What could that mean for your finances?
It really reminded me of the first time I ‘invested’. I’d be thinking about it for months, read about it, listened to podcasts, researched, nearly clicked the ‘go’ button so many times but somehow was just not quite able to. I’ve no idea how I managed it the first time, or what the catalyst was, but I did it. I bought into an index fund.
Then I straight away set up a standing order, for £10 a month (at first), which I totally wasn’t planning to do but it had just been so simple. Once you are ‘an investor’ you might as well be ‘an investor’. That’s I think when my interest in this stuff really caught fire. Little old me - broke, stressed, overwhelmed-by-numbers - was an investor!
Have you ever felt the leap?
Love Eleanor. xxx
