Talking the Talk

by Beverly Tjerngren

The biggest challenge facing many people who move to a foreign country is learning a new language. I've been fairly lucky in that respect since my interest in languages led me to start learning Swedish on my own as soon as I developed an interest in a Swedish guy. In addition, I've always had a bit of a knack for picking up languages, so by the time I moved to Sweden four years ago, I could read the language well enough to get myself around Stockholm with little trouble (aside from my terrible sense of direction, that is), and even to get the gist of short newspaper articles. Once I was actually here, my language development moved even more quickly and after less than a year I could converse reasonably well--if fairly superficially--about most subjects.

A year-and-a-half after the move, my husband and I moved to northern Sweden--where most people speak English with much less ease than in Stockholm--and suddenly I was forced to conduct the bulk of my communication, social and otherwise, in Swedish. While this situation proved frustrating at times, it was very good for my language skills and within a relatively short time I had reached a level that many would call fluency. I wasn't so sure. While reading and writing the language came easily enough to me, understanding it spoken came somewhat less easily, particularly when listening to the television or radio or speaking to someone on the phone, and when it came to speaking I felt no more than adequate.

As time went by, my Swedish proficiency continued to grow, but my confidence did not follow suit. Even after I scored the highest possible grade in the "official fluency course," I did not feel as though I could say with honesty that I spoke fluent Swedish. That came only after our internet connection went down one day last fall, and my husband wasn't home to make the call to tech support himself.

In accordance with Murphy's Law, we have major computer problems at home only when my husband--the computer professional--is not available to fix them. This last problem struck just two days into his ten-day business trip to Malta, and I simply could not wait more than a week to get online again. Instead of calling our ISP's tech support, however, I called my husband. In Malta. He urged me to call tech support, but I protested vehemently that there was no way I could do that. I hated speaking Swedish on the phone under the best of conditions, and the prospect of trying to manage a detailed conversation in tech-speak was simply out of the question.

My husband, being the patient and understanding soul that he is, did his best to talk me through the diagnostics. He helped me run a number of tests, but they all proved fruitless. Without being in front of the machine he had reached the limit of what he could do. And as if that weren't bad enough, he needed for it to be fixed, too, because the work he was doing required him to log on to our server at home. Something had to be done and by default it fell on me to do it.

After much pacing and muttering, I braced myself and made the call to tech support. The guy who answered the phone had a thick dialect and was very difficult for me to understand. Not only that, but he could have used some work on his customer service skills. Mercifully, it was a brief call. He told me to call my neighbors and ask them if their internet connections were up and running. If they were, the problem was definitely with us and I should call back to see if we could figure it out.

I called my brother-in-law who lives a couple of houses over and he told me that their internet was working just fine, so I gathered my courage again and made another call to tech support. Much to my relief, I got a different person and he was much, much easier for me to understand. He was also helpful and friendly, and over the course of the next fifteen minutes or so, the two of us worked together to figure out the problem. As it turned out, our electrical adapter had given up the ghost, so he sent one right out to us and all was right again in our world.

And things were maybe even a bit more than right in my world because that phone call is what finally made me believe that I really could speak Swedish. Up to that point I had usually had my husband make phone calls for me because I didn't feel as though I could handle it myself, but since then I don't think twice when I have to make a phone call to the doctor's office or to my daughter's teacher or to anyone to whom I might have to speak Swedish. Because I speak fluent Swedish, too.