This morning we dropped Tage and the dogs off with Olof’s parents and the rest of us drove to Kåge, a little town about a half-hour away. Lydia took part in a big karate practice there in preparation for tomorrow’s belt tryouts, something she’s been looking forward to with equal parts dread and delight. Her regular beginner’s class has four students, while the practice today gathered nearly forty students ranging from white belt to brown, so it was interesting to watch. More interesting, however, was the sensei leading the workout. It took all of about two minutes for me to realize he was American, and his treatment of the Swedish language left me cringing.

I hesitate a little to say anything, because he probably speaks Swedish better than I do (it turns out that he’s lived in Sweden for some twenty years), but his accent was really something else. Someone on an expats in Sweden message board that I frequent has said many times that all native English speakers sound ridiculous when speaking Swedish, no matter how good their command of the language might be, and it must be people like this karate guy that he has in mind when he says that. His American accent was so thick that it was a struggle for me to understand him, and even Olof whispered to me that he was having trouble. I really felt for all those little kids who were supposed to be taking directions from him, because his pronunciation of certain words made them all but unrecognizable. It seemed that he had no sense at all of the rhythm of the language, and his vowels … oh, my GOD, his vowels.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just flattering myself when I think that my own accent is much better than that. Maybe my message-board acquaintance is right and all English speakers do sound that bad. I surely hope not.