yum, love to eat my words (on asymmetric language skills)

when my swedish fiancé and i first started dating, we watched some episodes of young royals, a swedish drama series about a teenage prince. he attends a boarding school, and the whole show is in swedish and everybody speaks swedish—except one girl, who understands everyone's swedish but responds exclusively in english. at the time, i chuckled a bit at how ridiculous it seemed. it confused me, how she could understand so much but speak so little. my fiancé suggested maybe she was shy or embarrassed to speak swedish. i'm familiar with language-learning processes and know it's a common experience that, for example, children of immigrants end up understanding their parents but not really speaking the language. but still, knowing about it in theory and seeing it play out were two completely different things. 

fast forward a year, and now i find myself in basically the same position as that character. i've learned languages before, and haven't had any significantly asymmetric skills. but this time around, i've been particularly shy and hesitant about speaking—i care about my fiancé's opinion, and as it's his native language, i'm incredibly nervous to speak in front of him, even despite his patience and support and nonjudgmental acceptance when i do. i've faced my fear as much as i can, but i still have ended up much better at listening and reading than speaking and writing. the most recent time we were in sweden, someone stopped me as we left a restaurant, and said in swedish that she loved my jacket and had been waiting all night to see who's it was. "thank you, it was me!" i replied, in english, simultaneously proud that i had understood her and a bit ashamed that i had become what i had laughed at before. 

despite barely speaking at all, i spend my free time reading novels in swedish. how much i struggle to comprehend them depends on the day and how tired i am, but in general i can read and understand a lot, and i've gone from very young adult to just young adult books in just a couple months. 

i'm crushingly aware of the asymmetry in my swedish language skills, but today i had it confirmed with searing clarity, as i took an extensive online placement test. half the test was simply questions to assess my own level, since it couldn't very well assess my speaking or writing, but the rest of the test was much more effective than other placement tests i've taken—i couldn't just process-of-elimination my way into the correct answer unless i actually knew enough about what the question was testing. i selected a2 level to begin the test with, and as i did well or poorly, a message would pop up about recommending i move up or down a level, until it found the level appropriate for me. when i got to the reading section, the screen recommending to move up a level kept appearing. i was shocked. it felt like the test would go on forever if i kept getting questions right. 

but finally it ended, and my results appeared, along with a disclaimer that asymmetry across domains was normal, such as reaching b2 in reading comprehension, but b1 in production skills like writing or speaking. "that sounds like a much more reasonable difference..." i thought as i stared at my c1 in reading comprehension starkly contrasted to my a1 in speaking. though my fiancé pointed out that the lowest of my scores were all self-assessed; he insists i'm at least a2 in speaking, and that i rated myself too low. 

regardless of just how stark the difference is across domains for me, the fact that there is a large difference is undeniable. and of course, i knew this going in. but somehow, seeing it spelled out for me hits me like a truck. moving forward feels impossible. i feel like i've tied my own hands behind my back; now when i pick a level for a language class, i'll be stuck choosing between insanely boring but matched to my speaking level, or matched to my reading level but impossibly hard to keep up speaking. how do people even learn how to speak? how can i bridge this impossible gap? why did i have to read so much???

i genuinely regretted, even if just for a moment, that i learned so much passive swedish. logically, i don't see how knowing more words, even if only in one dimension, could be a disadvantage. but for a moment it felt like one. i wallowed in despair, and flip-flopped tearfully between choosing an a2 intensive course or a b1 regular-paced course. 

then my genius, level-headed, problem-solving (and did i mention handsome?) fiancé thought to search for "conversation" courses instead. and boom, there they were. speaking-focused, bite-sized sessions, specifically for the level i'm at. it still feels scary, but it definitely is exactly what i need. 

so i'll start that in about a month. until then, i'll try not to get too weird about continuing to further the gap between my reading comprehension and my speaking skills—because i'm definitely not going to stop reading den förlorade liljan. 

my placement test results