Yes, thanks for understanding, that’s what I meant. Especially American tourists have a poor reputation with language awareness.

Even back then, English language imperialism was far along, well before public internet or mobile phones. In recent years, I am on video meetings with people all over the planet, and English is, for better and worse, the language used. I usually remember to appreciate & thank people for meeting in a second/foreign language, since I had some experience of living in a foreign language myself and how it takes extra effort!

Our group of exchange students had a summer language immersion program in Sweden for about two months before school started. Most of our group never learned Swedish well. I was one of the few who became fluent. I had taken a year of Swedish before, but there are very few places in the USA to learn Swedish so most in the group had none prior to the summer program. Also I was more motivated, because my mother’s side of the family is all Swedish-Finn and Swedish, and I have Swedish-Finn relatives in Finland. Mormor was first generation American; Morfar was an immigrant himself, came to the USA as a young man, never spoke very clear English.

My father’s side, as you might guess from my last name, is German…

My classes were all in Swedish, but since I was mainly studying Datalogi (computer science) all my books were in English, by American authors.

My korridor-mates in student housing all wanted to learn American English slang. Most English taught in primary & secondary schools in Scandinavia back then was based on British English, but American slang was what was “cool” to young Swedes. I wanted to get fluent in Swedish, so I spoke almost no English, and they were a bit disappointed I wouldn’t speak English much with them. But I would explain American slang (and politics, it was an election year) to them in Swedish with a bit of English. And they watched American TV shows, and news, so they got plenty from that.

Enjoy your time in Sweden!