I will be honest, I suck at spelling. I may be slightly better than the dyslexic at least that’s what I think. It could also have to do with the fact that I’ve been surrounding myself with good spellers. Who knows. But it took me years to sort out “get” and “got”. It’s not like I don’t understand the usage and the meaning. I just had a hard time when I had to write it down. I still need the help of the spell check for the difference between “practice” and “practise”.

Now with the learning of Swedish, I’m trying to wrap my head around Swedish spelling. For those who don’t know, the Swedes have 3 extra vowels. If you’re an English speaking native, the vowels are “extra”. If you’re a Swede, then the English language is missing 3 vowels. In English, instead of having ä,å,ö, we use combinations of letters. I used to write “er” or “or” instead of “ö”. It lead to some unpleasant results. For example hötorget, which means hay market turned into hortorget, which roughly turns the HAY market into a WHORE market.

It’s usually the vowels that trip me up. Like today for instance, I wrote, “Jag är inte saker.” The vowel I should’ve used was an “ä” instead of an “a” in “saker”. Saker means things in Swedish where as “säker” means sure. Basically I told Fredrik that I am not things instead of I am no sure.

Don’t even get me started on the pronounciations. I’m always mixing up the sounds.