Språk

Swedish is a fun language. Aside from the fact that I can curse at people in a normal speaking voice and not a soul will understand me, there are all sorts of weird words and phrases that give the language a unique flavor. Take the word for jealousy, avundsjucka, it literally means "envy sick". It seems to suggest that the Swedes regard jealousy/envy (curiously, the Swedes don't seem to make a distinction between the two terms) as a sickness, something which afflicts someone, rather than a personality trait. I rather like that implicit interpretation, just like the symptoms of the common cold are nothing permanent, jealousy is something that infects us but can be cured.
I recently learned from my Swedish class there are two ways to say "will". There's the regular ska, which my tutor says denotes roughly an 80% certainty, and kommer att, which denotes a 90-95% certainty. So for a while when I wanted to say "I will fly to Sweden" I would have said "Jag ska flygga till Sverige" but now that I've bought the tickets, I'd say "Jag kommer flygga att till Sverige". The Swedes apparently can hear a situational difference between the two and it would sound weird to them to use the wrong one.
One of the eternally confusing things about Swedish (and many Germanic languages, for that matter) is their insistence upon combining words together while we would simply have a phrase. There wouldn't be a problem with this except for the fact that a lot of their words are combinations of other words already. So when you come across one of these you can't be sure if it's a phrase or a word and picking apart a word as though it was phrase only makes things more confusing. For example, nymodig means "modern", but if you thought it was a combination of words you'd translate it as ny (new) modighet (courage). This happens to be one of the more charming instances of picking apart Swedish words, it's so fitting that modernity then is "new courageousness". It just sounds so progressive and optimistic. There's also gammalmodig, which means "old-fashioned", and if picked apart you'd get "old brave". I thought that made nymodig even more charming because not only is it brave to embrace the future, but so is holding on to tradition and heritage. Then I found out from my teacher that mod in this case is more akin to "mode" in English and that it's just "new mode" and "old mode". But by God, I still say there's something to it! Swedes should know this better than anyone: there is something to be said about retaining the old while embracing the new. I for one believe in modighet, both ny and gammal!