It’s been just over two months since we moved to Stockholm. It’s been relatively smooth sailing so far, largely thanks to our awesome housemates and the general hospitality of the Swedes we’ve met. Almost all Swedes can speak perfect english, save a number of migrants. Ironically, it turns out that you usually get better service at shops if you speak proper english as opposed to attempting to speak Swedish.
Which unfortunately turns out to be a massive problem if you’re actually tring to learn Swedish. I’ve not felt it as much since I’ve been doing stuff by myself for the most part and haven’t had to converse in Swedish very much, but it’s alot more tricky for Marty since the default conversational language at work is Swedish. It’s particularly bad when they have Fika, or coffee break, where they gather round and have coffee and cake…and speak mostly in Swedish.
One of our goals coming over was indeed to learn Svenska (that’s Swedish in Swedish) in the time we were here and we made some good headway initially. As things got busier, Marty with work and me doing PAFs we’ve put aside less and less time to actually try and pick it up. Marty keeps going on about the previous app she used for learning chinese and how there wasn’t an app with the features she wanted for learning Swedish. And so, therein lay PAF #3, Svenska Ord or Swedish Word, an Android flashcard app. It’s somewhat of a cop-out because it’s in Java/Android, and I’d like to justify it by seeing it’s the first project that will actually provide some actual practical benefits to us 😛 I’ll be attempting to do as much TDD as possibly, so we should have a nice set of tests at the end. Realistically I think the coverage will be mostly at the back-end rather than the front.
Here’s a copy of the spec Marty put together when we were planning for PAF #3:
On a side note I’ve gotten annoyed that I don’t get notified when folks reply to my comments on other blogs, so I’ve installed subscribe to comments reloaded on my instance. Let me know if you run into issues with it.