I thought I should try to write in English every once in a while. Because I need to practice, because my U.S. friends ask me if it isn’t about time and, ultimately, because a dear, old friend looked me sternly in the eye the other day and told me to get on with it.<\/p>\n
And so I did.<\/p>\n
Or, rather, I tried. I tried writing a very short and simple text about our visit to the U.S. Embassy in English, only to end up with a few half-finished, poorly phrased sentences and a level of frustration that took two beers and half a bag of pistacchio nuts to get rid of. I ended up writing the damn thing in Swedish just to get it out of my head.<\/p>\n
It shouldn’t be this difficult. I do small talk, I tell jokes, I argue with my husband (and win!) in English – writing should be easy, but it’s not. I can’t find the words and expressions, grammar is impossible and everything sounds…I don’t know…slightly off. Most of all, words and finished texts, no matter how short or insignificant, belong to me in an entirely different way when I use Swedish. They are closer to my heart, that’s the best way I can describe it, at least while using English.<\/p>\n
So this whole switching-language-experiment, I don’t know, in a way I would like to just forget about it. But my dear old friend is a very persistent woman and smart too and I can feel her giving me one of her stern looks all the way from Uppsala, so fine, I’ll give it a try. Every fifth text or so will be in English from now on. Maybe every seventh to begin with. And every once in a while, \u00a0if I can come up with a good enough excuse, I will be allowed exceptions.<\/p>\n
Here we go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought I should try to write in English every once in a while. Because I need to practice, because my U.S. friends ask me if it isn’t about time and, ultimately, because a dear, old friend looked me sternly in the eye the other day and told me to get on with it. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,24],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-inenglish","tag-korkat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/1417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inglandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}