The pattern I didn't know I had

I grew up in a small town in northern Sweden, so Swedish is my mother tongue. Event though I grew up monolingual, English was always there in the background. We'd get cartoons in English, and I'd watch them without understanding much. Me and my friends watched Ghostbusters on repeat when we were six or seven — my mom couldn't figure out why we loved it so much, because we couldn’t understand the English or read the subtitles.

At age 15, I remember buying Buffy the Vampire Slayer on VHS. It was an import version with no subtitles, so I looked up every word I didn’t know and built a little handmade dictionary that I tucked inside the box. When I let a friend borrow the tape, I left the word list in there for him. He said it helped.

In high school I watched tons of American movies without subtitles, which really developed my listening comprehension — it worked far better than three years of French in junior high ever did. I wasn’t even trying to “get good at English”. I just loved the culture and wanted to watch these movies to relax. Even today, I tell people to “just keep watching and listening, even when you don’t understand everything”. I was doing it intuitively already back then.

Years later, I lived in the US for a few years — a dream come true, and a chance to fully immerse in the culture I loved. Every word I didn’t know, I’d ask about or look up, until there wasn’t much left to look up. I was often mistaken for an American. Some of my classmates were shocked to hear I was from Sweden. “Where’s your accent?” one asked. “I thought you were this surfer dude from southern California,” another one said — even though I don’t surf. Maybe it was the relaxed vibe. Or the long hair.

After the US, I worked in Norway here and there, and I figured, why not learn some Norwegian? As a Swede, Norwegian is already about 80% comprehensible out of the gate, so I picked it up by talking with my coworkers — speaking Swedish at first, then mixing in more and more Norwegian, jotting down words and expressions in the notes app on my iPhone 3G.

Both English and Norwegian showed me the same thing: when a language is already mostly comprehensible to you, you can absorb it with enough exposure and curiosity. The real test came with two languages I understood nothing of to begin with — Cantonese and Finnish. That's when I really learned how to learn a language from scratch, which is a very different thing.

It all started with fish balls in Times Square

Back in 2017 I was standing at a food stall in Times Square (the one in Hong Kong, not New York) about to order curry fish balls in Cantonese. A woman beside me turned and asked if I needed help, since the whole menu was in Chinese. I told her “Thanks, but I’ve got this”. I’d watched someone order curry fish balls from that exact stall in a YouTube video, and I’d practiced the phrase, word for word.

Earlier that day, I had landed in Hong Kong. Stepping off the bus into the city, I felt something I can only describe as a sense of home — like I belonged there. And during that trip I felt the Lord leading me very clearly to learn Cantonese.

It didn't feel like an assignment. It felt like a fire lighting up — a pull I couldn't have ignored if I'd tried. I just had to learn this language.

It was never really about the languages

Here's the thing might surprise you: languages were never quite the point for me. The cultures were. The people were. And I don't think you can ever truly know a culture and its people without learning the language.

I felt the first hint of that young. When I was twelve I had a pen-pal in Manchester, England — our families had met on a summer vacation in Greece — and I still remember that thrill of realizing I could actually communicate with someone from another country and be understood. We wrote letters back and forth, and it cracked something open for me. So did ordering food in broken Greek on family holidays, and learning to order a glass of water in English at age nine.

That's what's really underneath it all. It’s not that I don’t love languages themselves — I do. I love how they sound, and I love trying to mimic the way natives say things. But it was never about an interest in grammar and linguistics. It was about the moment you're standing around a grill with a group of friends, talking about life and just hanging out together — and it's all happening in a language that wasn't yours, in a country that isn't yours, and somehow none of that matters. You're just in it. Part of it. There's no feeling quite like it, and learning the language is the only door I've found that opens it.

With every new language, it feels less like adding a skill and more like adding a part of myself — a side of my personality that only comes out in that language. I usually don't even realize it's there until after I've learned it. Like a part of me that was just waiting to have a home.

Music came first — and taught me how to learn

Long before I started intentionally learning languages, I was obsessed with music. I started playing drums at nine and practiced every single day from my early teens well into my twenties — for hours and hours. I played in bands, studied music at university, and toured with professional artists in Sweden, and played gigs in Italy, South Africa and the US. For most of my life, music was the thing.

Some say being a musician gives you better pronunciation. I'm honestly not sure that's true — I've seen it go both ways in people I know. But for me, I believe all those hours transcribing parts and listening for the smallest details sharpened my ear and my attention to the nuances of how people speak. Those nuances have always fascinated me, in music and in languages.

Those tens of thousands of hours of music also established a few things that turned out to be central to my language learning: pouring years into something purely because I loved it, the power of daily practice, and that long-term consistency beats short-term intensity. And maybe most importantly — while a lot of people chase fluency like a finish line, music taught me early to enjoy getting better at something with no finish line in sight. That carried straight over. These languages are part of my life and who I am, not a goal I'm trying to cross off. My only real aim is to feel comfortable in them — understanding comfortably, speaking comfortably — for myself, not for anyone else.

In the fjords of Norway with my wife and two boys — a country that's become deeply meaningful to us.

My home office in Finland — where I do most of my learning and writing.

Why I do this

I created Lingtuitive in 2021 because the content I was looking for as a learner didn’t really exist. I was always left wanting more. I wanted to know the concrete details: How much time did you spend each day? What exactly did you do? How? That's how I try to write — practical and concrete, not getting lost in theory.

For a long time this blog was just a hobby. I was coaching, teaching, doing a bit of everything, and one day I asked my wife what she thought I should focus on. Without hesitation, she said I’d be happiest doing the blog full-time. It surprised me — because back then it was nowhere near big enough to live on, and I didn’t think it was possible. But she was right. And I kept writing because I felt the Lord leading me to, and years later it became something I never imagined. It started as a passion project, and it still is one. I look forward to writing every day, because I just love it.

That's the whole idea: my own journey, laid out honestly, for you to learn from and hopefully be inspired by. Learner first, blogger second. Nearly everything I recommend has been part of my own learning. The rare exception is when I round up the best apps for a particular language and include one I haven't personally learned with — but have genuinely tried and tested enough to recommend. When I do, I make sure to let you know. I’m always upfront about how this blog makes money — you can read exactly how on my affiliate disclaimer.

My passion for languages hasn't dimmed since 2017. Give me a free moment and you'll find me watching something in Cantonese, using a Korean app, reading a book or listening to a podcast in Finnish or Spanish. It’s become as natural as breathing, and keeping that kid-like curiosity has always been a priority.

Lingtuitive exists for one reason: to make your language learning easier, more enjoyable, and more concrete — the stuff I wish I’d had when I started.

If there’s something you’re stuck on, or a tool or topic you’d like me to dig into, I’d love to hear it. Head over to Connect and send me a message — knowing what you’re actually wrestling with is what makes this blog better.

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