Desire Avenue

This blog made me laugh and i particularly liked the 7th reply,from Jenta.

http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/snuggling/ ... cret-code/

In my experience it's only the city people that swith to English the moment you start speaking Swedish with an accent. In the countryside the people look surprised and just talk back in Swedish, which is very good cause how else would I improve it? Oh and they love to mention how good you are at speaking their language! Same goes for Norway.

I guess that's not typically swedish, In fact it's not what I felt in my experience.I remember my trip to Stockholm and I was nicely surprised to have everyone replying in swedish when I said basic swedish words (but then I was embarassed as I couldn't figure out what they replied so I switched to english). But it was the opposite in Iceland, they never replied in icelandic when I talked their language ! Like if they know I couldn't figure out what they said because of my foreign accent...

The best places I remember for learning languages were Spain and Portugal are they were always very proud that I tried to speak their language and they always encouraged me and corrected my grammar.

So I'm not really sure what to think about all this, as I'm not sure all those behaviours are country wide at the end. Maybe it's easier to speak the whole conversation in english (and minimize misunderstanding so) and it's really a big effort to understand someone when the way a word is said is totally wrong...

Unfortunately I haven't been to Sweden yet...

But in Germany it happens the same, specially in big cities. Whether you're in a restaurant or in a shop, as soon as the other person notices a foreign accent, they will start talking to you in English. Different in the countryside though, where most people can speak little or no English at all.

I've found the same thing in Denmark the times I've been there - most people in the towns seem to speak English and are very happy to do so, but when you get out into the countryside the native tongue prevails.

My daughter's godmother has lived in Denmark for many years now and speaks the language fluently, I guess her Scottish accent musn't be too noticeable now as the natives always reply to her in Danish.