I challenge you to understand inner-city Glasweigian

I know people who have been living in ZH for 5-6 years and don't speak German or Swiss German. Personally I think that it would be unavoidable, that simply through hearing it around you, on telly etc that you would soak it up even if you tried to avoid it. I think there is a barrier humans place around themselves when it comes to languages, that through fear they refrain from attempting the language, that they feel embarrassed for their mistakes. I love them, I love the looks on the faces of the cashier ladies in supermarkets when I blurt out a strange mix of Dutch, Swedish and German (they are so similar that it tends to merge into one language). Laugh and they laugh with you. OK, I was brought up bilingual, learned another Germanic language (Swedish) later on, so German is not syllable soup for me.

Swiss German almost sounds Scandinavian so my brain tells me I should understand but my ears disagree. I can pick out and hear the words and I don't have trouble retaining the vocabulary. Strangely enough when I guess a word, my girlfriend tells me it's Swiss German, or closer to Swiss German than High German, even though I am learning Hoch Deutsch.

And yes,when you live in Sweden, the Swedish government puts you into 500 hours of free Swedish lessons, 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. I lasted 2 months as I had the most dreary teacher who just dished out reams and reams of verbs. I worked at the same time so I just fell asleep in class. Also they take the grammatical approach to learning a language, which I can't. I prefer a functional approach. I quit school, went to work, told everyone to speak Swedish to me, even though they all speak excellent English, and 18 months later I was fluent.

People bang on about kids being able to soak things up. Why should adults not have the same capacity? Or is it that kids just don't have the same hang-ups and inhibitions as adults?