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Propedeutic languages (+Dutch/Afrikaans) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5644 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes  Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French | Message 9 of 17 30 January 2014 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think learning Afrikaans to learn Dutch will just confuse matters. If you have already
started learning Dutch you might as well build on that instead of starting a different language. I started learning Afrikaans after five years of Dutch but I'm finding it difficult to seperate the two languages in my head, especially the pronunciation. It's risky business. Also, you don't have to be awesome at Dutch, you have to be ruthless and persistent. If Dutch people speak English to you, just keep speaking Dutch back and eventually they will feel silly and switch. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4706 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 10 of 17 30 January 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Agreed with this. Tristano, I know people speaking English to you can be annoying. However, don't let it stop you from keeping at it! I've found in the past that when I smile and explain I want to learn Dutch, people are generally accommodating. I feel like only a huge jerk would refuse a polite request like that. And you don't want to hang out with jerks anyway. Benny also has a good article on getting people to speak to you. Finally, to echo what Iolanthe said: people speaking English to you is not necessarily a reflection on your level. It has to do with a lot of things. Sometimes people just want to practice their English. Sometimes they're just used to speaking English with foreigners because few foreigners learn Dutch. You've got to just keep your chin up and keep going. :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 11 of 17 30 January 2014 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the thing is that beginning to learn Afrikaans wouldn't solve the situation now that you gave the important detail: people switching to English.
If you stopped now, you would just let Dutch rot for a year whatever amount of time with the possibility of building confusion field for the two close languages in your head. But people wouldn't stop switching. You would come back to Dutch and they'd still be switching and it's hard to tell whether they'd stop because of your awesomeness earlier or later than without the Afrikaans divergence. And you would spend a year in English, building friendships and other relationships in English. Those may be difficult to switch to Dutch after a year or rather more than the year (year +the time to get awesome). So, don't let the people get you down. Keep speaking Dutch or ask the not to switch. They should understand you have come a long way to get practice not to give lessons. And as an Italian, you share an awesome advantage with all the non native English speakers. In some situations, you can really quickly just pretend not to speak English. Yeah, it sounds stupid but sometimes it's the best way. By the way, are you learning from English based materials only or are you using a mix? It might be a bad luck to accidentally learn Dutch with clearly English accent :-D 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 12 of 17 30 January 2014 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some years ago I tried to do a 6 week challenge in Yiddish in order to get more excited about German. This was a complete failure. Nothing helped until I found German materials that made me excited about German. In my experience, it's good to read books that take place in a familiar culture, for example the first book that I managed to finish in German was a translation from Finnish. You're in the L2 country already, you're learning the culture anyway so it won't hurt to read something different.
Also, how much have you worked on your pronunciation? When I started Polish I did shadowing and learned tongue-twisters and I went to Poland with less than two months under my belt and managed to seem like a serious learner of Polish. For a non-linguist, pronunciation is the easiest thing to evaluate. Do you have any Dutch friends who can give you honest feedback without too much sugar-coating? And keep insisting. My biggest problem in Malta was that it made no sense to insist on Italian if people switched to English/initially addressed me in English. Everywhere else, I find that if I speak L3 even if people try English, they usually stop insisting at this point. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4293 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 13 of 17 30 January 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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If really the switching to English is the problem, that is truly very annoying, and I
know from experience. However, learning Afrikaans and quitting Dutch would not help, because you live in the Netherlands--it would make sense if you lived in Pretoria, Cape Town, Bulawayo, or Windhoek. The best method now to improve Dutch is not to learn Afrikaans, but to simply continue Dutch. The idea of having a propeuduetic language I have never heard thereof before in this sense--Afrikaans is not like Latin and the Romance languages, since Afrikaans diverged from Dutch. Wikipaedia say that the closest language to Proto-Germanic in the present era is Icelandic. I tend to be sceptical of what Wikipaedia say, but even were that true, learning Icelandic to have a general overview of the Germanic languages like learning Latin would be cumbersome at the very least. The same would occur trying to learn Afrikaans to improve Dutch instead of simply continuing directly with Dutch. If you work in the Netherlands, the aforementioned interference might cause annoying occurrences. If you write a report for work but continue to mix Afrikaans into a written Dutch report, for example, colleagues might be confused, especially as to why a native Italian speaker is mixing Afrikaans spelling, grammar, and vocabulary into Dutch. I know that older Dutch had "sy" or something, which is used in Afrikaans instead of modern "zij", but if you wrote "sy" in a report for a Dutch company, it would be quite odd. I am not sure how many South Africans have moved to the Netherlands, but there are quite a few in the UK, mostly children of British parents though. Anyone who has heard of Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott, Craig Kieswetter, etc. know about this phenomenon in the UK. Still, I have never heard of many people in the UK learning Afrikaans to speak to South African immigrants to the UK. Perhaps the South Africans in the Netherlands are usually Afrikaners, but if I had to guess, probably they simply learn Dutch anyway. Returning to the switching to English, being a native Italian speaker is a gift, because you can say that you cannot speak English. Simply say, "Engels? Ik spreek geen Engels." I doubt that they would force English because if you refuse again, it will make them look silly. Being a non-native Anglophone is an asset here so just keep insisting on Dutch, pretending to speak only Italian and Dutch and no English. I am a native Anglophone, but I have partly Spanish ancestry, and my forename is Spanish. Herefore can I actually fool people to say that I speak no English, so this is my new strategy for quite a while. When I was in the Netherlands last year, I remember saying, "Ik kom uit Spanje" or "Ik kom uit Chili" or "Ik kom uit Argentinië". It actually worked most of the time, and I am actually taking a risk of looking idiotic because if they see my passport, ID cards, etc. it would be quite obvious that I know English. But I am willing to risk being discovered as an Anglophone and looking like a fool, but being able to speak the language as a trade. As a non-native Anglophone, you do not have to worry hereabout. Maybe also add, "Non inglese"--I often say, "Ik spreek geen Engels, no inglés por favor, maar het Italiaans en het Nederlands." Edited by 1e4e6 on 31 January 2014 at 2:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 17 30 January 2014 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Be insistent. We're not all impatient jerks :)
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4050 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 15 of 17 31 January 2014 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Ouch, a lot of answers! Thank you all!
Ok, @Tarvos, hehe I know :) It's a matter of praticity, I cannot blame them! @1e4e6, my situation at work doesn't help me at all with English. I work for a large european organisation, with people of different nationalities... I don't know any Dutch person there! And my closest colleagues are Italian and French. And we work at 100% with English. It will be never requested Dutch. Therefore, these people are also my friends and after work I usually go out with them. I do other activities and I even had a girlfriend for a limited amount of time the learned Dutch and she's from east Europe but she's not Dutch and she's not my girlfriend anymore. And she knows some Italian... and the most of the Dutch I knew know some Italian as well (usually more than the Dutch I know). I use a little Dutch when I go to the supermarket or at a caffetteria, but it's useless anyway. It's useful only with some asian people that know Dutch but not English. After, usually it is said that the best way is to find a girlfriend that speaks that language. Unless the fact that Dutch don't seem to calculate expats and most of all don't seem to calculate expats that don't speak Dutch (mostly because a lot of people go to the Netherlands but really few establish their roots there). So I can find a Dutch girlfriend if I already know Dutch generally speaking. Also, I'm an introvert, a social introvert but still an introvert so I need long time to have conversations longer than "Goedenavond", but this also in Italy :) So I cannot rely on conversations, and I also don't leave alone so I can speak aloud only when my flatmate is not at home :) I'm not a Benny Lewis that goes to a complete stranger and if knows only the words me, you and beer go to this person and says Mij, Jij, Bier :D Actually, I'm speaking English even with people that are Italian but don't know that I'm Italian... I know, my character doesn't help at all. I should try with a language exchange (already tried, I created a language club but at the end people was coming only to know new expats, but it was useful to train my English when I was working only with Italians). This time I would prefer to do it in Skype with people that is committed to language learning. The only reason I want to learn Dutch is to be able to have a Dutch girlfriend and/or Dutch friends if it will ever happen, and because documents are written in Dutch. And some companies don't hire Dutch speakers (but for that, I can simply avoid to work for them). After, it is my first Germanic language (English doesn't count) that it is worthy to open that language family. To finish, I think is absolutely unacceptable that I'm here from more than 1 year and I still don't speak the language (also the major part I know here is not supportive, the say that learning Dutch is useless - I disagree with them of course). All this fluent in 3 months - fluent in 6 months and stories about people learning a language in one week make me feel really bad. @Cavesa, in this moment I did the first 5 cd of Michel Thomas, the Pimsleur, the first lesson of Assimil and relied almost entirely on native resources. Still, when a person talks in Dutch I can try to understand the general meaning but not in detail (unless is talking to me, than I cannot concentrate of what is saying because I feel under pressure since the people expect to have an answer from me and I generally ask to repeat in English). I'm learning the grammar and some vocabulary but it takes time. all: you convinced me that the idea of using Afrikaans is not effective, better learn Afrikaans after Dutch only if I would be interested in Afrikaans and not to learn/improve Dutch. Then, I can ask people to speak only in Dutch but is not the best when people work, they don't want wastes of time. (once I bought a book written in Dutch and I went to the kassa, the conversation was something like: me: Goedemiddag him: Goedemiddag, gchgchgchcgh chchggggchch? (sorry, Dutch to Italian speakers sounds exactly like this, just ask for confirmations, I'm sure I'm not the only one) me: ... (I didn't even get that he was talking to me) him: gchgchgchcgh chchggggchch??? me: (now it was clear that he was talking to me) WHAT!?!?!?!?!? him: oh sorry, do you want a bag? me: ...ok him: this book is written in Dutch, did you notice? me: ...ja...? Not the best. I hate this kind of situations.) While writing this post I realised that the main obstacle I have with the languages is my personality. Consequently I can speak a language only if I'm confident, but I'm confident only if I can speak it. Edited by tristano on 31 January 2014 at 2:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 16 of 17 31 January 2014 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Heh, your personality seems similar to mine :) How good is your writing? Try getting to know people online and writing to them, and eventually meeting them in real life maybe. Post to lang-8.
During the usual interactions in stores, cafés etc, keep in mind the typical things you can be asked. want a bag? have a discount? (learn about the various kinds of discount cards/programs) ID please? (when buying alcohol or sometimes paying by credit card) Chances are that by now you can understand the words for sugar or milk when buying a coffee. Buying other things brings in some variety but it's still a rather limited set of phrases. Also, just changing what? to wat? can help :) Especially if it's about the discounts or other store-specific things that not all native speakers know. And sometimes it just helps to keep listening. You may well get the gist even if the first things you hear make no sense to you. Finally, look confident no matter what. Don't show how clueless you really are. Earphones without any sound in them can be a good tactic. You may be perceived as impolite if you ask wat? without taking them out, then take one out and ask again, then ask once again with both earphones out... but this will get you the needed number of repetitions. And if the situation you described happens again, just say "yeah I'm still learning Dutch"... in Dutch, obviously. Fatigue is one more legit reason to be clueless btw. Cover your mouth and yawn, lol. Just don't make them think your knowledge is the problem. In general I'm against conformism but sometimes it's important to match other people's expectations :) Don't confuse them and don't show your own confusion either. Edited by Serpent on 31 January 2014 at 11:38am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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