James Hannah

About a year ago, a man named Andrew said to me, ‘You just like to be dif­fer­ent, don’t you?’

He said it because I’d men­tioned that I was about to go on a bread­mak­ing course, to learn how to make sour­dough bread. I hate all other forms of cook­ing, by the way, because I’m rub­bish at it. I just wanted to at least bake some­thing I thought was enjoyable.

Dri­ving home that evening, I finally landed on the per­fect response: ‘No, Andrew, I just don’t like to be the same.’

Oh well, yet another killer come­back, lost to the ages.

It’s a shame, though, isn’t it? To have some­thing you are enthused about to be dis­missed as being merely ‘dif­fer­ent’? It’s a real joy-killer. So, with this in mind, I’ve been want­ing to pre­empt such an exchange by work­ing up a cheery and con­struc­tive response about my lat­est enthu­si­asm: I’m learn­ing Swedish.

I’ll admit it’s a hard sell, because even I start to think ‘Typ­i­cal me…’.

Why? Why Swedish? Var­för svenska?

Andrew’s rea­son­ing would doubt­less be the blandly util­i­tar­ian, ‘Why learn Swedish? Are you going to Swe­den? You should learn Chi­nese or some­thing – they’re the ones who are going to take over the world.’

NO. I will not have my enthu­si­asm damp­ened on the basis of its use­ful­ness. I don’t want to, if you’ll for­give me, die with the knowl­edge of how to con­duct busi­ness in Man­darin. I want to die at some ripe old age with advanced knowl­edge of how to speak and lis­ten to a lan­guage packed full of danc­ing vow­els, bounc­ing energy, long, longgg con­so­nants, and pre­cise sibi­lants that can turn on a six­pence and reverse and send you off in unex­pected directions.

So far I’ve come up with this opener: ‘I’m learn­ing Swedish for sev­eral rea­sons, none of which are any good.’ Ho ho. That gives any­one an ‘out’ if they want to take it.

If they’re inter­ested or bored enough to get as far as the sec­ond rea­son, I say: ‘Because I watch a lot of Swedish films’. This is short­hand. I watch the films of Ing­mar Bergman, and I haven’t watched many other Swedish films. But peo­ple gen­er­ally don’t know who Ing­mar Bergman is, so I say ‘Swedish films’.

If you’re Eng­lish, you’ve prob­a­bly spot­ted the prob­lem. An Englishman’s response to ‘I watch a lot of Swedish films’ is always: ‘Ohhh yeahhh?’ — by which he means ‘All the pornos?’.

I haven’t fig­ured out what the con­nec­tion between Swedish films and pornog­ra­phy is. Maybe there’s a con­crete his­tor­i­cal fact that a lot of skin flicks emerged from Swe­den back in more inno­cent times. I don’t know. My sus­pi­cion is that it’s some vague mash­ing of ‘for­eign’ films with Swedish lib­er­al­ism, mas­sage, saunas, and a gen­eral sense of Nordic phwoar.

Any­way, it doesn’t mat­ter: I have a killer come­back pre­pared for exactly this sit­u­a­tion: ‘Yes, but I’ve pretty much learnt all the vocab­u­lary needed for those films: “Ja, ja, ja…”.’

So, mov­ing on. The really seri­ous peo­ple will grad­u­ate onto a whole nother level of the con­ver­sa­tional tele­scope. The real rea­sons. The rea­sons, I main­tain, that aren’t very good. But they’re good enough for me. I think really it boils down to two or three things:

I really like the sound of the lan­guage. It has the pas­sion, expres­sive­ness and light­ness of Cym­raeg, with the pre­ci­sion and clean­li­ness of Deutsch, and also enough of the Eng­lish struc­ture for it to be less intim­i­dat­ing than some lan­guages. The fact that it is not in the Pre­mier League of trad­ing lan­guages makes it all the more appeal­ing to me: I can approach it some­how as a pure lan­guage with­out any of the bag­gage of past learn­ing fail­ures. Does this make sense? No?

One other major rea­son is: I never thought I would learn another lan­guage. If you know me, I will have told you at some point that, despite it being com­pul­sory to take at least one lan­guage at my school, I was per­mit­ted not to take any, because I was so bad at them. Truly, truly disinterested.

Even to this day, I am fun­da­men­tally dis­in­ter­ested in learn­ing how lan­guages func­tion. It’s just too much like hard work. Verbs and nouns and adjec­tives and— oh all that.

I will go out of my way to not learn what an adverb is (just as I go out of my way to not learn what the chords are on a gui­tar) because I find that whole direc­tion of approach to learn­ing so— tir­ing. It’s unnat­ural. Like writ­ing wrong-handed. Frankly, I’ve got more fun things to do.

A lot of peo­ple don’t under­stand this atti­tude. Maybe they’re right.

But, after ‘Bergman’ and ‘lik­ing the lan­guage’ had got me to enrol in the first place, my Swedish tutor was able to con­fide some­thing mar­vel­lous: ‘I was like that too!’ There are, she explained, peo­ple who are good at learn­ing lan­guage, and peo­ple who are good at using lan­guage – and the two can be quite separate.

I already know, in my cart-before-horse sort of way, the sub­tle but absolute dif­fer­ence between Eng­lish verbs like walk (walked) and seal (sealed) —i.e. voiced and unvoiced end­ings. The thing is, I just didn’t know that I knew it. I was enchanted. Delighted. Enriched. And it didn’t hurt a bit.

So, I sup­pose this presents my main answer to the ques­tion ‘var­för sven­ska?’ And it’s quite a good one, I think. In my Swedish class I can learn about myself, and dis­cover what I didn’t know I knew. The sub­ject tells me all sorts of things about myself that I hadn’t realised, and it sheds new light on things that I already know about.

Take the title of this let­ter: ‘Var­för sven­ska?’ Swedish for ‘why’ is ‘varför’. This is, you are doubt­less already think­ing, much like ‘wherefore’.

There­fore: ‘where­fore’ was once Eng­lish for ‘why’.

There­fore, paus­ing briefly to blow the dust off my degree in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture, ‘Romeo, Romeo, where­fore art thou Romeo?’ means ‘Romeo, why are you Romeo?’. It’s more in the spirit of ‘Romeo, why are you from the fam­ily I am sup­posed to hate?’

Another brick for the wall of pedantry I’m build­ing between myself and the rest of humanity.

So my killer come­back to ‘You just want to be dif­fer­ent’ should in fact have been: ‘No, I just am dif­fer­ent. And look at all these lovely peo­ple who are equally dif­fer­ent to me.’

Ah, that feels so much better.

And it’s less a ques­tion of var­för sven­ska? and more one of var­för inte svenska?

Why not?

And screw you, Andrew!

Hej då

j