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Intelligibility, Afrikaans & Dutch?

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
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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
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 Message 9 of 36
23 November 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged 
ReneeMona wrote:
if it is spoken slowly and clearly you can have a conversation but speaking quickly and throwing in colloquial speech and slang makes it significantly harder or even incomprehensible.


Well, isn't it like that with all languages? The natives can always choose to speak in a way that makes their language incomprehensible to all but the most advanced learners.

Today I listened to two of those podcasts, and the first contained some advice for second language learners - probably mostly directed at those within the borders of South Africa because there were references to some specific tests. But being a program for second language learners you would imagine that the participants tried to speak clearly and without too much slang.

In the second podcast the main theme was infrastructure, and here you might expect less consideration for eavesdropping foreigners. Actually one gentleman spoke with much more pronounced diphtongs than anybody in the first podcast, - I don't know whether native speakers of Afrikaans reckon with dialects of their language, but this seemed like some kind of dialect. Nevertheless I could understand him fairly well (my expectations concerning level of comprehension may be lower than ReneeMona's).

I'm seriously thinking about making some more videos in different languages (including Afrikaans) so I try to become aware of details in the 'sound' of Afrikaans - (not least on the points where it differs drastically from Dutch). And when I listen I follow the rule about not listening for the meaning, but rather for the words and sentences. And precisely when you ignore it the meaning just pops up by itself.


Edited by Iversen on 23 November 2010 at 1:51am
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CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5123 days ago
193 posts - 238 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 10 of 36
23 November 2010 at 7:06am | IP Logged 
ReneeMona wrote:
Written Afrikaans poses little to no challenges at all for me and I can read it almost effortlessly, understanding at least 90%. Spoken Afrikaans, however, is a different story. In this interview with Charlize Theron I can understand almost everything she says perfectly. She's speaking to a Flemish journalist through so I'm guessing she's making an effort to keep her speech as clear as possible.

Iversen, thank you for that link you posted. I've made several fruitless attempts at finding spoken Afrikaans materials before and this site looks really good.
I listened to one of the podcasts for a couple of minutes and I found it quite hard to understand. The speaker speaks quite slowly but I could still only get the gist of it, rarely an entire sentence. When the person at the beginning of the podcast was speaking much faster, I only caught the occasional word. I can definitely hear that it's close to Dutch and I feel like if I focused more I could make out what it means but if I let my focus slip for a second and just start listening, the words hardly get through to me at all. I haven't had much exposure to spoken Afrikaans though, so I assume it would get more comprehensible if I listened to it more often.

I read a thread a while back where a native Afrikaans speaker (can't remember their name at the moment) explained that there are different levels of colloquial speech and wrote something in apparently pretty everyday speech that I could make head nor tail of without a translation. I'm sure that if I heard it spoken I would have absolutely no idea what was going on.

So from the perspective of a Dutch speaker with limited exposure to Afrikaans, I would say that the written language is pretty easy to make sense of and if it is spoken slowly and clearly you can have a conversation but speaking quickly and throwing in colloquial speech and slang makes it significantly harder or even incomprehensible.

As for the difficulty level, I think Afrikaans is considered easier than Dutch since it has abandoned verb conjugations and grammatical gender. From what I've seen, sentence order seems pretty close to Dutch.


Iversen wrote:
ReneeMona wrote:
if it is spoken slowly and clearly you can have a conversation but speaking quickly and throwing in colloquial speech and slang makes it significantly harder or even incomprehensible.


Well, isn't it like that with all languages? The natives can always choose to speak in a way that makes their language incomprehensible to all but the most advanced learners.

Today I listened to two of those podcasts, and the first contained some advice for second language learners - probably mostly directed at those within the borders of South Africa because there were references to some specific tests. But being a program for second language learners you would imagine that the participants tried to speak clearly and without too much slang.

In the second podcast the main theme was infrastructure, and here you might expect less consideration for eavesdropping foreigners. Actually one gentleman spoke with much more pronounced diphtongs than anybody in the first podcast, - I don't know whether native speakers of Afrikaans reckon with dialects of their language, but this seemed like some kind of dialect. Nevertheless I could understand him fairly well (my expectations concerning level of comprehension may be lower than ReneeMona's).

I'm seriously thinking about making some more videos in different languages (including Afrikaans) so I try to become aware of details in the 'sound' of Afrikaans - (not least on the points where it differs drastically from Dutch). And when I listen I follow the rule about not listening for the meaning, but rather for the words and sentences. And precisely when you ignore it the meaning just pops up by itself.


Both great answers! Thank you!

Do any of you think it would be feasible to use Afrikaans as a stepping stone from English to Dutch? By that I mean, could an English speaker learn Afrikaans, then learn the Dutch modifications, in order to make it pure Dutch later on?
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 11 of 36
23 November 2010 at 10:06am | IP Logged 
Yes and no. From a purely linguistical point of view it would make sense to learn Afrikaans before Dutch. But the differences are not so big that they can outweigh the main problem with Afrikaans, namely getting relevant study materials. Even though relatively few persons study Dutch (compared to for instance French and German) the supply is much better.
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CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5123 days ago
193 posts - 238 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 12 of 36
23 November 2010 at 1:57pm | IP Logged 
Thank you :D

One more question :P

Could one use both Afrikaans and Dutch study materials together? I would imagine that if one studied using materials of both the languages, that the amount available would rival more popular languages. Would this be a bad idea do you think?
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 13 of 36
23 November 2010 at 3:08pm | IP Logged 
Bad idea. Learn one first (at least to basic fluency, where it has become reasonably robust), then the other. Otherwise you will mix them. I know, because I'm mixing Bahasa Malaysia and Indonesia right now.
5 persons have voted this message useful



CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5123 days ago
193 posts - 238 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 14 of 36
23 November 2010 at 4:44pm | IP Logged 
Ahh okay thanks! I think the amount of learning materials available for Afrikaans or Dutch will be the deciding factor between the two...

Just curious, which do you like better? :)
1 person has voted this message useful



EmmiInEurope
Tetraglot
Newbie
South Africa
nederlandsvirafrikaa
Joined 5116 days ago
13 posts - 26 votes
Speaks: Afrikaans*, English, French, Dutch
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 15 of 36
23 November 2010 at 10:59pm | IP Logged 
Hi

I'm Afrikaans speaking and moved to Belgium a year and a half ago. Initially I
understood very little (around 60%) of the Dutch I heard on TV or radio - took about 2-
3 months for my ears to adjust and understand most of it.

As for Dutch people understanding me, it depended very much on the person. Some people
would understand me at about 70%, other at only 30% - I think it depended on their
experience with languages, and maybe the dialect they grew up with. Initially
conversations with most people turned to English after a sentence or 3.

After 18 months my Dutch is now pretty good - but it took a year of lessons, watching a
lot of Dutch TV, reading Dutch books etc. Still, I don't think in any other language I
could have reached this level of fluency in only 18 months. My husband, who is less of
a language nerd, didn't take lessons, and still basically speaks Afrikaans with some
Dutch words here or there, and although he can communicate he finds it much more
comfortable in English.

By the way, we find it much easier to understand Dutch, than Dutch people find it to
understand us.

You can also have a look a http://nederlandsvirafrikaanses.weebly.com , a website I
created after my inlaws visited and I was just amazed at how badly they were understood
- and then tried to figure out what the most basic things are you can change to your
Afrikaans to make you better understood.


Edited by EmmiInEurope on 23 November 2010 at 11:01pm
9 persons have voted this message useful



CheeseInsider
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5123 days ago
193 posts - 238 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 16 of 36
24 November 2010 at 9:12am | IP Logged 
EmmiInEurope wrote:
Hi

I'm Afrikaans speaking and moved to Belgium a year and a half ago. Initially I
understood very little (around 60%) of the Dutch I heard on TV or radio - took about 2-
3 months for my ears to adjust and understand most of it.

As for Dutch people understanding me, it depended very much on the person. Some people
would understand me at about 70%, other at only 30% - I think it depended on their
experience with languages, and maybe the dialect they grew up with. Initially
conversations with most people turned to English after a sentence or 3.

After 18 months my Dutch is now pretty good - but it took a year of lessons, watching a
lot of Dutch TV, reading Dutch books etc. Still, I don't think in any other language I
could have reached this level of fluency in only 18 months. My husband, who is less of
a language nerd, didn't take lessons, and still basically speaks Afrikaans with some
Dutch words here or there, and although he can communicate he finds it much more
comfortable in English.

By the way, we find it much easier to understand Dutch, than Dutch people find it to
understand us.

You can also have a look a http://nederlandsvirafrikaanses.weebly.com , a website I
created after my inlaws visited and I was just amazed at how badly they were understood
- and then tried to figure out what the most basic things are you can change to your
Afrikaans to make you better understood.


Wow! Thanks for your message! It's good to hear from an Afrikaans speaker what it's like conversing with a Dutch speaker. I'm going to check out your website now!

Edit: Oops it's in Afrikaans :P Oh well, I'll save it for later when and if I can read it! ^_^

Edited by CheeseInsider on 24 November 2010 at 9:13am


1 person has voted this message useful



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