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Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes 
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 9 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:27pm | IP Logged |
@Kerrie
I'm not that much of an HTLAL slave either :). Dutch has been on my list for a long
time, too (I even asked whether to choose Swedish or Dutch just a month ago or so, and
asked some more questions about Dutch a couple of years ago), 6WC has just made me
start it sooner.
Dutch is definitely closer to English than German (vocabulary, grammar, maybe even
pronunciation), and your background may make it easier, too. I wish you good luck with
your German - I believe this language has quite a steep learning curve but it gets
easier when you've mastered the basics. That's the experience I made, at least.
I wish you great progress in all your languages in 2012-2013! And if you start Polish,
you can count on me.
@montmorency
Unfortunately, I haven't read your comment on my log. I tried googling it, going back
to the thread and doing all the gimmicks I know but I'm afraid it's gone. If you've
written anything more please post it again.
I'm especially interested why you've given up on Dutch (at least on its active
learning).
From what I've seen after a month of dabbling in Dutch a couple of years ago, and two
and half days of learning it ;), its similarity to German and English is the biggest
bonus and, at the same time, probably the most serious danger. It's fun to figure out
all the differences and similarities but I'm afraid that when the initial fascination
is gone I may not be motivated enough to learn all the little and time-absorbing things
that a fluent speaker needs to master. I aim at passive skills mostly, though, so this
may not be a problem.
I see you've studied some Norwegian - I wonder whether it was before or during Danish.
I've started Swedish recently and want to focus on it soon but (passive) Danish and
Norwegian are somewhere on my hit list, too. I don't want to start them too early,
though because it could be destructive to my (non-existing) Swedish.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 10 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:28pm | IP Logged |
montmorency wrote:
I've managed to get to my HTLAL log:
Hi @Julie,
German/ vs Dutch accent - what you say rings a bell for me, although for me it was the
other way around.
I tried to teach myself Dutch, mainly through "Hugo's Dutch in Three Months", with
book and later, audio cassettes. It was a fairly "pedestrian" course at the time, I
thought, and I didn't learn to speak or listen very well, but I did better in reading
it. But that was a long, long time ago. I've had opportunities to get back on nodding
terms with Dutch from time to time in the succeeding years, but without applying much
effort. Probably around, or at least, 20 years after my forays into Dutch, I started
learning German for the first time, in a variety of classroom settings, later
supplemented by self-teaching materials. My wife (who knew German pronunciation quite
well) used to complain that my German sounded like Dutch!
Eventually, I "got" German pronunciation, and actually grew to prefer it to the sound
of Dutch (the opposite of my original feeling). I haven't given up the idea of one day
getting to grips with Dutch "properly" (and with all the modern aids we now have), but
I'm sure my attempts to speak it will sound "too German" for quite a long time. :-)
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Hekje wrote:
| Thank you! And yes, my eyes are on your log. :-P |
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1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 11 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:31pm | IP Logged |
montmorency wrote:
Hi @Julie,
Well done for finding your log on HTAL! So you know the story on my Dutch. Just to add
that once I started learning German, I thought it was best to put Dutch out of my mind,
since I was finding German difficult enough, Dutch was close enough to interfere, and
often not close enough to be helpful. Also in the back of my mind, Dutch was associated
with a period in my life that I wanted to forget, so too much "baggage" associated
with it. I was still interested in it at an intellectual level though and by now could
cope with the "baggage", so I hope I will return to it one day, but I'm not a polyglot
like many here, and can barely cope with 2 active languages at a time, let alone more
than that :-)
Yes, Norwegian before Danish, originally for a trip there, and planned a year in
advance, so in theory I had a year to learn it (using TYSN), but I'm afraid I skimped
it. We went via Denmark, and Sweden though, so it was interesting to see how far
whatever I'd picked up would get me. Not much with speaking, but I could read quite a
lot. Then later, BBC started showing Danish TV drama and a lot of us got hooked. It was
fun trying to spot words (guessed from English or German), but I didn't think seriously
about learning it until I got involved with a blog devoted to one particular series
("The Bridge"|"Bron"|"Broen"), and was inspired by one couple on there who had decided
to learn Danish (I think actually for business reasons - they had their own business -
but they were also well into the culture) from scratch, and were doing it in a kind of
total immersion way, but at home, and with the aid of lessons from a native speaker. I
couldn't do it that way, but I somehow became convinced it was possible, and worth
doing. And what little I retained from Norwegian was mostly still useful in Danish (and
ultimately I suppose I'd like to learn all three properly in due course.......polyglot
or no polyglot ... :-) ) I'm sorry, I'm rather hogging your (b)log, aren't I? I'd
better keep quiet for a while, and let you get a word in edgeways :-) |
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1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 12 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
montmorency wrote:
| I'm sorry, I'm rather hogging your (b)log, aren't I? |
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You're more than welcome to do so :). Plus, you were just answering my questions :).
In the long run, I'd like to learn Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish (two of them passively
only, I'm not a polyglot either :)). Originally, I planned to start with Norwegian (I
even still have NorWord e-mails somewhere) but finally I decided to learn Swedish first.
I enrolled for an intensive course, beginning this October, and started reading about
Swedish grammar and learning some vocabulary. Hopefully, I won't mix Swedish and Dutch
(it's not the most reasonable choice to start them both at pretty much the same time, I
admit).
1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 13 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
Tarvos wrote:
I learned most of these languages (or am learning, I should say, especially concerning
Swedish) the other way around, coming from the Dutch native speaker group and having
learned English and German as foreign languages (although these days I have a hard time
considering English a foreign language...) What I found the most exasperating about
German (I can't speak for English as I learned that one right off the bat and thus
never really went through the excruciating stage of having to learn to pronounce the
sounds correctly etc.) is the way it feels like I'm phrasing things more or less
correctly, but not entirely correctly. This is because for me the crutch works vice
versa, and that's difficult because I have to add complexity in order to speak German -
not subtract it grammatically.
So whenever I speak German I feel like I'm speaking a sort of Dutch-German unholy
mixture (sort of like Portunhol), even though the mixture is quite good, quite
effective, and seems to have no problem being understood by anybody well-versed in
German. The reason is mostly because I use a slightly approximated pronunciation (the
sounds are more or less the same and the intonation is slightly different, but the two
ch sounds give me trouble - well actually, one does. The hard one I can of course do).
All in all I feel that using these languages as a crutch due to their similarities
isn't a bad idea for beginners, but as someone pointed out to me the other day (coming
from a Norwegian background) the amount of idiomatic expressions and little subtleties
and nuances that you need to know to really speak perfect Dutch are very tough to
master. Dutch is quite rich in its loanwords, expressions, and sayings and often,
especially vis-a-vis German, the real differences aren't in the base vocab but in the
details, where Germans will use different agglutinated word combinations as opposed to
Dutch people. They'll both have Germanic roots, but often the word that is used in
either is archaic for the other language. The best crutch is actually Plattduutsch or a
strong east Dutch dialect - these are so similar to the other variants that speaking
flat out dialect to German people will be understood with a bit of adaptation (given
that the German on the other side of the border is also a local and will thus
understand, more or less - the dialects form a continuum across the border with Germany
as they do extending south into Belgium).
Use what you can, but once you get past the initial strangeness hurdle, you'll realise
Dutch may suddenly take some strange left and right turns here and there and you'll
have to get used to the complex expressions that make Dutch Dutch and not German.
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1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 14 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:34pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for your input! I think it is a general difficulty you experience when learning a
closely related language, especially if you want to go beyond passive skills... Basic
communication seems easy but it may be hard to suppress the stronger language at some
point and learn all the little things, idiomatics etc.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 15 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
Tarvos wrote:
Passive skills in German are really easy to obtain if you know Dutch, particular if you
know dialects which may use words that have an exact German cognate (often Dutch
dialects use antiquated words which are not in common use in standard speech, but are
often found in the spoken language of a particular region). Flemish uses a lot of words
that are Dutchified German words, basically, that aren't found in the Dutch standard
language (they similarly borrow from French). I am quite sure it will work vice versa
as well, depending on how good your knowledge of the West Germanic dialects is
(speaking Platt is a big help). This is why most Dutch people can, as a rule, be spoken
to in German - odds are they have studied it and can guess the rest, although they
might not enjoy being spoken to in a language they don't give a flying dingo's kidney
about.
But really speaking Dutch requires going out and doing all the legwork, unfortunately -
the thing that makes Dutch easy is that you get the insta-leg up and that the time
you'd normally spend amassing loads and loads of simple vocabulary and constructions
can be condensed into less time because you're going to pick up the patterns really
fast. The road from A1-B1 in Dutch is easy as pie for a Germanic language speaker -
also for English speakers!!!!! Dutch has many many Latinate loanwords from French and
they are in common use - often words have two synonyms, a common Germanic one and a
formal Latin one, leading to Latin being the $1000000 word! Dutch orthography isn't
entirely phonetic but it's mostly so, and the rules for what isn't phonetic are easy to
learn (dropping n's at the end of conjugations/plurals, devoicing) so you'll get it
quite quickly. Our spelling reflects English better than it does German too (a lot of
c's instead of k's, etc.)
An example is "rechtspraak" (right-speech), as contrasted to "justitie" (from Latin).
Justitie is a formal word and is only used with regards to the ministry (Ministerie van
Justitie), but these kinds of situations are very common.
There are more of these types of examples. Often these words have slightly different
connotations to allow the loanword to play a specific role or fill a specific niche;
"verbeteren" means "to correct", to improve" but "corrigeren" means "to correct" only
in terms of correcting a mistake. e.g. Ik ga mijn fout corrigeren (I am going to
correct my mistake) and Ik ga mijn fout verbeteren (same meaning) are both allowed, but
verbeteren can also be used in a different context "Ik wil mijn resultaten verbeteren"
(I want to improve on my results).
Sometimes specific Latinate terms are used, especially in formal writing; "erratum" is
something you get when you've made a mistake, but informally you'd just add a
"correctie" (also from Latin). |
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1 person has voted this message useful
| Julie
Heptaglot
Senior Member
PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6902 days ago
1251 posts - 1733 votes
5 sounds
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French
| Message 16 of 140 09 August 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
Tarvos wrote:
Note also that you should be aware of which orthography is being used - the current
orthography is that of the last BIG reform, which was in the late 1990s - if you happen
to stumble upon a text from before those days, note that many of the places where Dutch
now has a c, these words were spelled with a k instead. There have been mostly
uninteresting minor spelling reforms ever since then, mostly concerning compound words,
the adding of buffer -s and -n, etc, but those are of no practical consequence for any
foreign learner. (It's a good thing there is no FSI Dutch online, because that would
unequivocally use the old spelling in use during the 60s-90s, which had all these old
features - I can tell a book is old from the way things are written in my parents'
books).
Insect used to be insekt, product used to be produkt, etc etc. If you speak with older
people that remember this orthography, they might still use these old spellings in
writing. They're considered unequivocally wrong, by the way. No one teaches the old
orthography anymore. Dutch has gone a "modernist" route with its spellings, and they
have consciously tried to reflect the old Latinate words better, as well as render the
spelling closer to English.
Choose your resources a bit carefully and keep them modern, so you don't get confused.
It has been mostly phased out, but you might still encounter it here and there. |
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@Tarvos, thank you so much for all the information!
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