|
 |
Thinking of switching to Dutch | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 1 of 6 12 October 2010 at 11:41am | IP Logged | |||||
|
For the past two years I've been living in Sweden as that's where I've been studying for university. That is at an end now and its come to the time for looking for jobs and...Sweden doesn't seem the best option for me at all. Its nigh-on-impossible to get a job here even with perfect Swedish let alone intermediate. And that's broadening my search to the whole of the Nordics too.
Looking at unemployment rates and checking job sites there seems to be a lot more opportunity in the Netherlands. I used to live in Holland, it was nice. The weather sucked and I was horribly poor but...yeah. I could imagine if I had a job it'd be rather brilliant. So...I'm thinking of dropping my attempts to get back into Japanese and toning down my ideas of trying to boost my Swedish up to a better level, rubbishing all ideas of picking up something new and switch over to Dutch. I used to speak a bit of Dutch. It was much worse than my Swedish but not too bad at all for how short I lived there. I suppose it helps that it reads like badly spelled English generally with only the occasional badly spelled German word to mess one up. I'm a bit concerned though; will learning Dutch destroy my Swedish? My Dutch died a horrible fiery death as Swedish replaced it...My Swedish is on a higher level than my Dutch was but still...I'm concerned. Though Dutch would be more useful to me I still like Swedish, and of course I'm pretty good at it, its perhaps the best I've ever known a foreign language. To fail never to again recover this far along... Also a concern- interferance, Dutch always found its way into Swedish in the early days of my learning...I'm a bit worried of this becoming the norm both ways. Would there be much cross-over links in learning? I know Dutch is called by the Germans 'baby German' and that Germans have a very easy time of learning Swedish. Do they have much of the Germanic vocabulary in common? Also a more technical problem- the R. I can't roll my Rs. In Swedish this wasn't such a problem, people always said I sounded a bit Danish anyway (which is interesting...northern England where I come from did used to be Danish....), it was rare people attacked me about my R. In Dutch though...I could G all night long but couldn't get the R and boy did my friends rip me for it. It seems to be a major hurdle to knowing Dutch. Is it at all tenable to learn Dutch with a English R? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 2 of 6 12 October 2010 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know about Swedish but I think this site says that Dutch and German have about 80 percent of their vocabulary in common. I think it's inevitable that you'll mix up Swedish and Dutch for a while, since they're both Germanic languages. I think your Swedish will disappear or at least erode unless you keep studying it or find a good way to keep it active.
Completely leaving the rolled r out will probably always sounds a bit weird but many Dutch speakers from a certain region (Mostly North Holland I think) don't trill their r either, sometimes not even at the beginning of a word. Personally, I find this really annoying sounding but it is a native pronuncuation. I don't know where you're from specifically but when I hear Americans who've learnt Dutch for years speak it they always have a really strong American r which sounds funny but it doesn't make them any less understandable. I guess the English r is such a strong sound that it's hard to change it. Maybe you should just tell your friends to shut up about it. ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 6 12 October 2010 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I have been told that I mix German words into my Dutch, and of course I have to try to stop it, but it is not something that can scare me away from Dutch.
The point is that you grab whatever word within sight if you are babbling along and suddenly discover a pothole in the road ahead of you - and the word you may choose to cover the lacune in that situation could be a foreign one. But without this mechanism you would have to stop speaking all the time in order to look words up - clearly not a good solution to the problem. As a matter of fact your frantic guessing may convey the correct information, but getting stuck in the middle of a sentence can't. And with time you will weed those irregular loanwords out of your language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5283 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 4 of 6 12 October 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I have wanted to get stuck into Afrikaans (and Dutch) for some time now. But the fear that it could completely screw up my German does kind of hold me back.
Looking at the matter in a strictly logical way, I guess this could only happen if I stopped having any contact to German while learning? i.e. If I stopped reading any German books and newspapers, stopped watching German TV, etc? Still, this is a very real fear with German vis-à-vis Dutch - you really don't want to think that you are sacrificing one of them in order to learn the other! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 5 of 6 17 October 2010 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Well, I've started, I'm going from the POV of just trying to get the vocabulary in and letting the grammer fall into place- its all rather old fashioned English styled anyway, a bit like Swedish.
Figuring out which words are most important to know. Standard convention seems to have simple kids categories like food, colours, etc... but I'm trying to be more utilitarian than that... Is there a actual codified learning method like this? Which sort of has a list of concepts/words which are most important to learn....if that makes sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5859 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French | Message 6 of 6 18 October 2010 at 4:17am | IP Logged | |||||
You could use this list I put together of the 10,000 most common words in the Dutch language, in order. http://liamrosen.com/files/10000mostfrequentdutchwords.txt Personally, though, I don't find it useful to learn vocabulary in this way. I just do the lessons, and whenever I come across an unknown word, I add it to Anki. That way, I have context for every piece of vocabulary I learn instead of mechanically learning them from a list. Edited by Liface on 18 October 2010 at 4:17am 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
