Surprisingly Swedish Saturday

On Saturday (if I say either “yesterday” or “today” it will be confusing since it just turned midnight) I drove to IKEA to buy some shelves that are being discontinued and are thus on sale. For the trip (more than three hours each way) I took along language learning materials on CD, including the Pimsleur Swedish course. Once I finished that (there are, alas, only ten half-hour lessons in that set) I tried the Michel Thomas Foundation course in Arabic. I had long wanted to try out a course in that series, since it is an all-audio approach, yet a bit different than the Pimsleur courses. My impression so far is positive – it basically lets you play the role of the relatively quiet kid in the back of the class! The Michel Thomas course focuses on Egyptian colloquial Arabic, while the longer of the Pimsleur courses focuses on the Arabic spoken in Syria and its neighbors.

If you’ve ever used the Teach Yourself Arabic Conversation CDs, you’ll recognize the voice of Mahmoud Gaafar, who gets to play less colorful roles in the Michel Thomas course.

Anyway, since today we celebrate the 4th of July, this post’s topic could seem inappropriate – were it not for the fact that our society was and remains multi-cultural and somewhat multi-lingual – as well as having declared our dependence on rather than independence from IKEA.