Reflections
In case you haven't noticed, I am into photos of reflections.
When I came here to Sweden, I had two goals. One was to save the world. That seems to be going well. The other was to become fluent in Swedish so that I can call up the old high-school girlfriend (a Swede) and scare the bejezuz out of her by pretending that I have been stalking her for past twelve years, and I am here now. I'm not sure if I will be able to meet that goal...
With the wedding, school, and work, I have not had time to study much Swedish for the past two weeks. It's really frustrating. From a grammar standpoint, Swedish is much easier than Japanese, considering my progress when I first went to Japan, and the fact that I have studied Swedish in the past, I figured that I would be able to hold a somewhat intelligent conversation by now.
In actuality though, at this time in my life, Swedish is a harder language to learn than Japanese was nine years ago. For one thing, it is almost impossible to find a Swede who doesn't speak English. (This is definitely not a problem in Japan). I have been trying to meet with a Swede a few times each week to speak swedish for an hour, but I have even been having trouble doing that, let alone find time to study on the side. When I studied Japanese that was priority number one. I spent almost all my free time either studying or struggling to speak it with friends. I also worked in a restaurant with non-english speaking coworkers, so even at work I was learning. Now of course, I have this "saving the world" thing taking up my time, so I am left with little time to study Swedish, and even if I do, I have even fewer opportunities to practice it.
Of course, if I compare the actual number of language exposure hours in my first two months in Japan vs. my first two months in Sweden, and look at how well I can speak each of them in relation to time spent, I guess Swedish is still a little easier. If I spent this little time studying Japanese when I first went there, I would not even be able to count to ten by now (I can do that in Swedish).
If only saving the world somehow required everyone to know Swedish...