Separated by a Common Language

The title of this post is also the title of one of the first books I read after moving to the titular town. (I recommend it if you know the town, or have reason to get to know it.) It's also what I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Tonight I'm in an airport hotel outside Copenhagen, after another heavenly...

The hardest thing to cope with for an English learner of Swedish is not the gender system in nouns, nor the voiceless palatal-velar fricative, nor the verb-second syntax. No, the toughest thing to learn is how to make do without a word for 'please'. I end up saying Tack ('thank you') in all sorts...

Hej från Sverige! That is to say, Hello from Sweden! English in Sweden is interesting because (besides being impeccable) it more often sounds American than British (at least in terms of vocabulary). My former Swedish tutor attributed this to the fact that Swedes get a lot of their English from television,...