Swedish students on the last day of class, sporting IKEA bucket hats
By Nordic Minor alumni, Delaney Westby (B.A 24′)
“When you sign up for SWED 100 at UBC, you probably expect that it’s going to be fun. From what you may know about Sweden – meatballs, IKEA, cold weather and cozy sweaters – it seems like a cheery culture.”
I expected to take one Swedish class, hopefully enjoy it, and then that would be that. What surprised me when I started the course was how close-knit but welcoming the Nordic Studies community was, and how exciting it was to learn about Swedish language and culture. I knew it would be a good time, but I hadn’t realized just how comfortable and at home I would feel, and that I would end up taking the full four courses of Swedish during my time at UBC.
There are a lot of things that make it great to be in Swedish class. One of them is singing. At the end of my first week of classes, I came home to my parents and told them that we sang in Swedish class. They were a bit surprised. “This is a university class, and you sing?”
We do. Every Friday. Apparently, a lot of Swedish culture involves singing. There’s no need to worry if you are scared of singing in public – we sit at our desks and Lena, our instructor, blasts a new song from the classroom speakers, and we look at the lyrics and mumble along through the new Swedish words, and laugh at anybody who passes by the classroom and gives us weird looks through the window. We’ve done pop songs, rap, ABBA, you name it. In December, we sang Christmas songs and danced around the desks like we were circling a big Swedish Christmas tree.
Nordic Studies students with the Scandinavian and Nordic Student Association
If you get excited about singing in class, you’ll be even more excited when you find out you can join the annual Lucia choir run by the Scandinavian and Nordic Student Association (SNSA). Every fall, students from the Swedish and Danish classes join the choir and perform in December as part of a Scandinavian celebration of winter. And if you join once, you’ll probably want to do it again the next year (trust me, wandering down a hallway in the dark with a burning candle aloft, singing haunting Swedish tunes like you’re a 19th-century ghost, is an intoxicating experience).
Swedish class isn’t all about singing, of course. It’s about eating as well – pastries and tea and coffee at the department’s weekly fika, or Scandinavian treats that classmates make for their culture sharing projects every term.
And it’s of course about learning Swedish – how to ask for directions, sing at the pub, swear, talk about bizarre Scandinavian habits, and anything else you could ever need to say to your Swedish friends. One of the things we do to get a deeper understanding of the country and the language is our culture sharing projects. You can pick absolutely any aspect of Swedish culture and engage with it however you want. I’ve seen my classmates submit cooking shows, short films, poetry, slideshows. Last year, my friend and I wrote a song about the Gävlebocken (a huge straw goat that, for some inexplicable reason, Swedish people illegally burn to the ground almost every December) and recorded ourselves playing it on piano and guitar. We love music and we love Gävlebocken, and we were able to combine those two things into a project entirely suited to our tastes. My favourite part of Swedish every term is coming up with a strange idea and figuring out how I can somehow twist it into a suitable project. It’s a delightful challenge every time.
SWED 210 students playing kubb
Swedish class is also, first and foremost, about the people you are learning with. On the very last day of SWED 210, we all went outside to play lawn games together. If you haven’t tried mölkky (from Finland) or kubb (from Sweden) before, then I hope you’re a fan of throwing wooden sticks. We didn’t fully grasp the rules of mölkky, but we still had a great time in the grass outside, on one of the first nice spring days of April, playing games together after two years of tackling vowels and word order and adjectives. It felt good to be surrounded by people I’d become familiar with, and have this new language that we all shared. I’ve never had a more memorable experience learning a language than I have in the Swedish program over the past two years, and now whenever I go to speak Swedish, I will be able to bring the program and my memories of it along with me.
