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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

You Scandinavians have it rough—your English is so often so close to perfect that the tiny imperfections that remain stand out. [1]

When I studied Russian there was an older student whose mastery of the language was so brilliant that native speakers assumed he was Russian. Unfortunately, his 99.9% mastery left room for 0.1% errors, and these were the kind of errors a native speaker would never make, so they sounded odd to Russians. Instead of recognizing him as a brilliant student, a lot of people took him for an illiterate (literally "grammarless") Russian and wrote him off as an idiot. A foreign accent has its advantages!

[1] In case it's not obvious, this being the internet and all, I'm complimenting you and I'm envious.

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Thanks. My guess would be that not dubbing TV and movies to our native languages contributes somewhat. Personally, I just played too much video games as a kid.

That's an interesting anecdote about near-perfect mastery having downsides! I can provide a different one but on the same theme. I saw a documentary a while back in which an immigrant sadly explained that if she made her absolute best effort to adapt and speak Swedish, she would get really crappy service in stores and such because of her accent and grammatical errors. If, instead, she spoke English (which she commanded better) she would get excellent service from everyone who were more or less racing towards her in order to be polite and service minded (although that's presumably for mistaking her for a tourist instead of an immigrant, letting their politics shine through...).

I've wanted to learn a second language for years, and Scandinavian languages are really interesting to me; the benefit being that Danish/Norse/Swedish all have a lot of similarities, so it'd help when learning multiple languages. I also have a lot of interest in the Norse countries as a whole in terms of history and craft. Unfortunately I find it damn near impossible unless I'm actually in the country whose language I'm trying to learn. My only hope now, I suspect, is to find some subtitled English shows (or Scandinavian shows subtitled in English) on the Swedish TV streaming sites :D

I really do wish other countries would export more of their own language media to the world. English/American TV shouldn't be so dominant. The only time I get a chance to watch foreign language TV is usually in hotels, where you can guarantee there will be German channels!

I think you'll find a bunch of stuff on the pirate bay. Off the top of my head I can think of these Scandinavian shows and movies that are all at least decent if not great:

Trollhunter // The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trilogy) // Let the Right One In // Cold Prey [Fritt Vilt] (trilogy) // The Bridge [Bron/Broen] 2 seasons // The Killing [Forbrydelsen] 3 seasons // Kon-Tiki // Dead Snow // Headhunters // Easy Money [Snabba Cash] // Norwegian Ninja

Thanks for the suggestions! The only problem I have with Scandinavian TV is that it's -so dark-. Most of those are semi-horror or crime shows, and that's far from a bad thing but it's hard to watch a lot of it in one sitting :D

And Norwegian Ninja sounds amazing.

The Scandinavian languages and English have a lot in common. I believe they even share a common language stem. You can take any word in a sentence, and switch it out with an english word or vice versa. So some of the basics are already there.

To expand a little on this: The region of Denmark from where I grew up has a lot of different dialects, all from within a very small area. A lot of Danish words resemble their English counterparts, and especially so when pronounced with a bit of dialect: hus/house, båd/boat, æg/egg, hest/horse and so on.

We did all live in the same kingdom a thousand years ago (during Canute The Great's reign). So I guess it makes some sense: http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/wiseman/Nordic/Nordic-1028AD....

I was about to coin the term "Uncanny Valley of Accents," but in Googling around I found that several others already had :(

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