Whenever I teach an English course I always suggest different ways to practice the second language casually at home:
1) Read books you have read before in your own language
2) Read magazines or blogs about topics you’re interested in
3) Read or watch the news in your second language
4) Watch TV or movies with subtitles
5) Listen to music or audio books
6) Play games
Since I’ve moved to Sweden and started learning Swedish I have tried to integrate the language into my day to day life by doing as many of these things as possible. I especially like to use my Swedish while playing games – it makes language learning more fun, social and casual:
(As a sidenote: board games in Sweden are way more expensive than in the U.S., 300-500kr in stores, depending on the game)
I’ve always enjoyed Scrabble, so I figured: What better way to work on my vocabulary than playing scrabble in Swedish? After being here for 2 years and refusing to pay 400kr for a board game that I’ve bought for 100kr in the past, I finally found one at a fleamarket for 40kr. Score!
Now, Scrabble does come in Swedish scrabble as well, but more popular is an almost identical game called Alfapet. (The Swedish spelling of “Alphabet” is actually “Alfabet”)
As you can see, the board and premise are exactly the same, but there are a few differences:
In Afapet, not only do you try to build on tiles that give you bonus points, but you try to avoid tiles that take away points. (Note the dark blue tiles)
Naturally, there are a few new tiles due to the different letters in Swedish. I was surprised that there weren’t more of these, as they are commonly used letters in Swedish.
Like in Scrabble there are blank tiles, that can be used as any letter without collecting value.
Now it gets interesting, as these next tiles don’t exist in Scrabble at all:
The black tiles represent stops. Once you use this tile you can spell a completely unconnected word next to or after another word: no common letters needed.
The arrows make it possible to turn your word another direction, making space constraints a thing of the past. This also allows you to turn your word so that you can collect bonus tiles that normally wouldn’t align.
We played for the first time last week, and it was a lot of fun. We initially agreed to use both English and Swedish words, so that I would have a fighting chance, but we played 95% Swedish words, anyway. It was a really great way to practice my Swedish – and I thought this variant of Scrabble was a lot of fun.
Siobhan says
June 29, 2014 at 2:45 pmMeg, we need to have a game night to practice 🙂 My apartment actually could work for that because we have a u-shaped couch. Let me know when you are home! Have a lovely trip!
loulouloves says
June 29, 2014 at 8:29 pmHa! To make it even more confusing, we use the Swedish board but with scrabble rules, we can use both languages, I can use the dictionary for Swedish to check only and double points for rude words…. Makes for an interesting night!!!
Hemborgwife says
June 30, 2014 at 11:33 amWe are huge Scrabble players and even though we only play in English there have been a few times where one of us puts a word down and then is like o crap that is Swedish!
Susanne says
July 8, 2014 at 10:13 pmI love Alfapet!! I really thought it was the same thing as Scrabble, but in Swedish.
I remember playing Scrabble with some friends the first time I lived in Ireland. It was so hard! I thought I was good at English but I totally sucked. I’ve been better when I’ve played Wordfeud and similar in recent years, at least.
Riana De Oliveira says
July 11, 2014 at 3:21 pmThank you for your blog, I find it very inspiring. We will be immigrating to Sweden from South Africa and came across your blog while doing some research
Joel Sherwood says
August 19, 2014 at 9:20 pmI agree, board games just seem pricey here. I don’t actually know what they cost in the US. But it’s one of those things that just feels like it should 10 bucks or so. Paying nearly 100 makes it feel like you’re buying Monopoly with Monopoly money.