Karlsson: Yes. So I will start with the Swedish word for “Hello,” which is “Hej.” My name is Johanna Karlsson. I come from Sweden. And my hometown in Sweden is in the very, very south of Sweden. It’s a town called Malmö. It’s actually the third biggest city in Sweden but it’s pretty small—three hundred thousand inhabitants.

Interviewer: So, I heard that you come. . . you come. . . came to Japan two years ago. Before that did you have. . . been teaching in other places? Before you came to Japan?

Karlsson: Yeah, actually I started teaching at high school level. My first year and a half, I was teaching in high school, teaching English and Swedish. But after a year and a half I quit and I started teaching at university instead. So I worked at Lund University. Lund is the neighbor city of my hometown. I worked at Lund University for three and a half years before I came here.

Interviewer: What did you teach in the university?

Karlsson: Mostly I was teaching Swedish for native Swedish speakers. And people who are studying Swedish in Sweden are people who want to become teachers or journalists or copywriters or professions like that. They study Swedish, so I was teaching them. Mainly I was teaching grammar and phonetics.

Interviewer: Thank you. So, is the Swedish language [is] the official language of Sweden? Is it?

Karlsson: Yeah. Well, we have a couple of official languages in Sweden. And Sweden is a very mixed country. For example, my hometown. . . not more than maybe fifty percent of everybody in my hometown has Swedish parents. The others, they have parents from somewhere else. Like, for example, I’m half Swedish half Danish. My husband, he is half. . . his father is from Belgium and his mother is half German and half Danish, so he is not Swedish at all. But of course he is still a native Swedish.

Interviewer: It’s very complicated.

Karlsson: Yes. So most people in Sweden, they have their roots everywhere. And therefore we have many official languages in Sweden; we have many old languages in Sweden that many people speak.

Interviewer: So, how about English? Are there many people who can understand and speak English fluently in your country?

Karlsson: Yes. Well, English is not an official language in Sweden. But we study English in school and almost everyone now study English for twelve years in school. They start at first year and then they go on all through high school. So they study English for twelve years. But it hasn’t always been like that. People over sixty sometimes don’t speak English very well, but if you are under sixty, you speak English fairly well and if you’re young, you speak it fluently, often. There are many. . . there are many theories why Swedish people speak good English, but I think the biggest theory is TV. Like always. Sweden is a small country. We don’t have that much of our own TV, so we import many, many TV shows and movies from other countries, from Britain and America and we never dub. It’s always subtitles, so every day we listen to English for hours from TV. So, I guess that’s why we understand English pretty much and pronunciation is not that hard because we always hear it. But I also think that it’s because of the school system. The way you study languages in Swedish schools is very based on using the language. Most people don’t write English very well, but we speak.

Interviewer: So, the situation is very different from Japan because we are mostly. . . our English education is mostly based on reading and writing and grammar, you know.

Karlsson: Yes. It’s a different thinking. For example, when you study English in a. . . in school when you’re a little child, six or seven years old, it’s not studying, it’s playing in English and singing in English and just having fun. So the real studying doesn’t start until years later and then you already know how to speak.