You have surely felt sometimes that a language course was boring and you aren’t that motivated every day and or the progress in learning doesn’t come that fast. Well, from my experience it is essential that you don’t compare yourself to others. For teachers it is crucial that you create a learning environment where students feel safe, relaxed and really feel that there are no stupid questions. Since questions must have come from somewhere. From wondering, misunderstanding, curiosity, previous learning experiences of other languages. As a student you should always feel free asking those question as many times as you want.

Google:

Google is a fantastic and free tool for language learning. Sometimes you learn a lot of words in language classes but you don’t really know how to remember them och what the words actually mean. It won’t really help to look them up in the dictionary. What you need is context. So whenever I don’t know or don’t understand a word in a foreign language I rather google it than open a dictionary. A language is a combination of words. Words create phrases and phrases create sentences. Let’s say you want to find out what the word pendlar means. You have to figure it out what part of speech the word is. It is a verb. So what you actually can do is to search in google in all tenses: pendlar, pendlade or har pendlat in combination with personal pronouns for example: jag pendlar, hon pendlade, han har pendlat etc. Combine them in different ways.

First you should check out how many results you get in google search. If it is just a few thousand the word might be very rare or you have misspelled it. If there are several millions of results it means that the word is very common in use.

You will then see many articles written by Swedish journalists in Swedish online-newspapers/sites. Skip the explanations of dictionaries and read the expression you are looking for in titles of articles and in the articles itself. It will be easier to understand how people use the word or expression and in what common combinations.

Some of my search results:

Jag pendlar en mil eller mindre

“Jag pendlar sjutton mil varje dag.” – Sydöstran

Jag pendlar till Varberg/Falkenberg/Halmstad,

I can understand from the context that the word pendlar means to commute in English. You can commute to and from cities with for example train. (pendeltåg).

But I have also understood from an other article that the word can also mean to swing in some contexts. For example to have mood swings or gaining and losing weight.

Jag pendlar så gräsligt mellan högt och lågt i humöret

Varför pendlar jag 2 kilo upp och ner? | | Aftonbladet