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A Padawan learns Dutch/Ind./Fr. - TAC ’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 241 of 568 29 June 2013 at 6:39am | IP Logged |
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A very quick update.
Dutch Today I have not done much other than write my grandpa and grandma a nice letter. The ease with which the writing flowed made me feel like I'm finally at a level in Dutch where I can express myself fairly specifically without too much mental flailing. There are still (and will always be) tons of mistakes, but it is coming much closer to fluency in the most literal sense of the word. Indonesian Today I dipped a toe into the Assimil. However, I quickly got distracted (by Dutch) and only did about 10 minutes of the lesson instead of the full 30. So yeah. Basically I just need to retrench and reload. I will probably start keeping a notebook, which isn't recommended in the course but also not unheard of on this forum. Thoughts from the Assimil lesson today: - There is apparently no word for "to be" in Indonesian (unlike être in French and zijn in Dutch). Instead, in the spoken language, there is a slight pause where the be-verb would be. So "Tetangga saya (pause) tua" is "neighbor me (pause) old", meaning, "My neighbor is old." - Verbs are not conjugated. Neither are adjectives or nouns declined at all. - The person speaking in the Lesson 1 recording has a super-mellifluous voice! They make the language sound very pleasant. I think this Indonesian experiment is going to be a lot of fun. Edited by Hekje on 29 June 2013 at 6:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 242 of 568 01 July 2013 at 8:25pm | IP Logged |
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Long post ahoy ahoy.
Dutch Okay, I haven't really done anything with Dutch except make the miniscule progress of moving to page 47 of Kartonnen Dozen. I totally forgot up to this point that Tom Lanoye was Belgian, which explains why my reading comprehension has precipitously dropped. I knew there was an explanation! @tarvos Ah ja, prijzen. Natuurlijk. Nogmaals bedankt. Oké, dat is heel duidelijk. In het Amerikaanse schoolsysteem lezen studenten meestal Amerikaanse teksten (ook al kunnen we wel ook Engelse boeken lezen), misschien is het daarom dat ik dacht dat Belgen meestal Belgische literatuur zouden lezen en Nederlanders Nederlandse literatuur. Maar als de geschreven taal in principe dezelfde is, dan maakt het niet uit. Wat grappig trouwens dat de Belgen een betere schoolsysteem hebben, aangezien dat ze ook al lang geen regering hadden. De werkwoordstijden - blijkbaar is dit dan allemaal heel toevallig, dat ik zoveel boeken heb gelezen die dan ook geschreven in de tegenwoordige tijd zijn. Wat vreemd. Ik herinner me nog dat ik de imparfait en passé composé ook redelijk moeilijk vond toen ik op de middelbare school zat. Het leek toen een willekeurig besluit, hoe je de verschillende tijden moest gebruiken. Het Nederlands is dan weer anders. Aanvankelijk vond ik de continuous tense ook uitdagend - ik moest goed onthouden om het niét te gebruiken. Ik probeerde altijd zinnen zoals 'Ik was aan het lopen naar...' te gebruiken, wat naar! Vooral grappig om deze verschillende manieren van uitdrukken te leren want je weet dat anderstaligen niet wonen in een parallel universum waarin tijd helemaal anders wordt gezien; ze hebben maar een ander manier van regelen. Maar je moet zoveel mental backflips doen om dat te begrijpen. Wat betreft Assimil - ja, ik heb al dezelfde ervaring. Daar ga ik meer over schrijven, denk ik. Indonesian So today I finished Assimil Lesson 1. Yay! My initial thoughts: Indonesian is a very pleasant-sounding language. It sounds, for lack of more technical terminology, very smooth. Lots of long, open vowels. Very charming. Some aspects of the language seem like a blessed relief at the moment because of how simple they are. For example, subjects are their own pronouns and possessives. Saya is "I" and also "me", and "mine" if placed after a noun. So kakak saya is simply "my older brother (or sister)", and you can do the same treatment with house or neighbor or whatever you want (rumah saya and tetangga saya, respectively). As I've already written, you don't need to agree adjectives or nouns. It's like an extreme of an analytic language. It's actually funny too because the Indonesian example sentences will often lack gender clues that the French translations require. The Indonesian third-person plural, for example, is mereka, which implies no gender, while French has male or mixed- group ils and all-female elles. So every time mereka comes up, the French translation must specify that it could be ils ou elles and has to painstakingly agree all the words in the sentence to match both possibilities. Times like these are when I switch to taking notes in English, since we have also lost our genders. One final thought - one thing I'm actively trying right now is to just accept Indonesian the way it is. When I started learning Dutch, I found a lot of things just inherently humorous because they sounded like something else in English, or I would struggle with grammar because it felt wrong and I didn't get "why" it was the way it was. There was no intention to actively resist the language or whatever; I just didn't realize that those kinds of attitudes were unproductive. Now I know that in language learning, there isn't really a why. It just is. Having this open mind from the beginning feels really good. Edited by Hekje on 04 July 2013 at 9:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 243 of 568 04 July 2013 at 9:16am | IP Logged |
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Dutch
Today I had a couple nice conversations with the boyf. He's super-nice; if I just switch to Dutch, he'll usually go along with it, no problem. I hope he knows how much I appreciate it. Indonesian Okay, I have listened or read from Assimil every day since my last entry, but I didn't actually sat down and do the entire lesson in sequence in one day until today. So now I've finished Lesson 2. Clearly the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. More Assimil thoughts/discoveries: - We learned about the suffix -nya today: baby's first Indonesian suffix. Attached to the end of a noun, -nya means "of him/her". For example, anak saya is "my child". Anaknya is "his child" or "her child". Rad! - Another thing revealed today: the origin of the word "orangutan". You see, orang means "man" or mens, gens, so on. When you put the name of a place after that, it describes nationality (e.g., orang Indonesia is "an Indonesian", orang Jepang is "a Japanese person"). And then there's orang hutan - "man of the forest". Yessssss, wonderful. Edited by Hekje on 07 July 2013 at 12:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 244 of 568 07 July 2013 at 5:31am | IP Logged |
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Dutch
I have watched some absurdist Dutch rap videos and read some news on AD.nl. Indonesian I have completed Assimil lessons 3 and 4. The course is pretty funny, I've been enjoying it so far. One thing that's been frustrating over these past two lessons is the trilled "r". It actually exposes a certain weakness in my Dutch pronunciation as well. Up till now in Dutch, I thought I was rolling my r fairly adequately. The thing is, though, that there's always been a slight difference between how I roll the r after a consonant and how I roll it after a vowel. When I roll the r after a vowel, it's really more of a tap. When I roll it after a consonant, it's a true trill that I can choose to shorten or lengthen. Now, when I'm trying to move the rolled r to more of a trill in Indonesian, the difference is very apparent. I can't properly trill the r at the end of 'Apa kabar?' like you're supposed to. It seems like I have to pause, shove my tongue back up to the roof of my mouth, and then try to force out something that is completely disconnected to the vowel preceding. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, I'd appreciate your feedback. I recorded myself reading a passage in Dutch and English so you can hear the difference between my various r's. Dutch recording Dutch: 'Na een paar weken had hij het gevoel dat hij al zijn hele leven op Schiphol had doorgebracht. Zijn decennia bij de uitgeverij waren naar de achtergrond gedrukt, hadden iets onwerkelijks gekregen. Het bijhouden van vertragingen op Schiphol, het bekijken van de reizigers en hun bagage, het verschilde niet veel van het werken in de tuin of van het uitgeven van boeken.' - Tirza pagina 139 English recording English: "After a few weeks he had the feeling that he had always lived at Schiphol. His decades at the publisher’s were pressed to the background, had acquired something unreal. The keeping account of the delays at Schiphol, the watching of the travelers and their baggage, it didn’t differ that much from working in the garden or publishing books." Of course I've already viewed various YouTube videos and will continue to work on this, just wondering if I could catch anyone on this log too. Edited by Hekje on 07 July 2013 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4499 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 245 of 568 07 July 2013 at 10:19am | IP Logged |
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I like your accent, Hekje, you pronounce Dutch like it's Afrikaans on a few occasions.
Your pronunciation is good and very understandable! Your phonemes are generally correct (and your stress is in the correct position), there is something about the sentence intonation that makes me put it as foreign, and one other thing is that you aspirate stops too much (your k is very breathy like in English, the Dutch k is never breathy. We don't aspirate stops). The r's are correct, I didn't even notice anything about them the first time round and I had to listen a second time to figure out that they were trilled, actually. Given that I myself have had to learn how to trill the "r" (if you have noticed in my recording, my R is French), I think the tap and trill in Dutch are allophonous (you can use either). I personally wouldn't know how it works out since I only get made fun of by my mother when I roll my r's in Dutch (says it sounds unnatural; she's probably used to my uvular pronunciation). I think a trill indeed is a lengthened tap "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr". However I'm not familiar with Indonesian phonology. Oh, and I love your English accent. Or well. American accent. Edited by tarvos on 07 July 2013 at 10:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 246 of 568 10 July 2013 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
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Dutch
Tarvos - Gee, thanks! I definitely see what you're saying about the sentence cadence and the aspirated stops. Much appreciate your pointing that out. On the whole, it's really gratifying to hear that my accent is likable! I've also never heard anyone say that they actually like my native accent, so thank you for that too. I fear that posting a recording in Dutch was not the most direct way of addressing my problems in Indonesian, buut it seems you understand me well enough. It's just frustrating at the moment because this trill in Indonesian is the same one I use all the time in Dutch, just usually attached to different phonemes, and suddenly I'm tying my tongue in knots over it. Ah well. It'll work out. In further news, progress has been made on Kartonnen Dozen. The book has (finally!) gotten a little spicier. Basically half of it has gone by without Lanoye doing more than coyly hinting that the reader might one day get to the actual key plot points. To say the least, I am ready. I also thought it might be nice to do a brief self-assessment at this time, given that the end of June marked two full years with Dutch for me. That is wild. To think that I was 19 when I started all this is totally nuts. Since then Dutch has enriched my life so much (*sniff, sniff*) if only because now I can watch quality farmer dating shows (aw yeah). But anyway, without further ado, I'll score myself by the CEFR scale and make some comments. Speaking - B2. I can definitely interact with spontaneity and fluidity, but not "without much obvious searching for expressions". There is still a lot of that. Listening - B2+? It's not totally clear to me how one scores listening. My level of comprehension varies depending on diction, topic, and clarity. If I'm having a one- on-one conversation, I very rarely have a problem understanding anything. If it's muffled voices on a reality show using a lot of slang to talk about cow feeding, I'll only get the general idea. Writing - B2+. I can definitely write clear, detailed texts now, but not about the kind of complex subjects that C1 would demand. Reading - C1. Longer and/or more demanding texts are quite accessible to me now, which is very gratifying. So overall I would score myself a high B2. Reading back through my log, I realize it has taken me over a year (from May 2012 to July 2013) to go from just below B1 to a B2+. Man oh man. Back when I first started learning Dutch, I would have thought that timeframe was preposterous. Now it seems quite reasonable. Anyway, I am excited to continue with Dutch. The language and culture prove more and more rewarding over time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4499 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 247 of 568 10 July 2013 at 12:24pm | IP Logged |
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I think that if you took on a new language, you'd go even quicker next time. You've also
learned "how to deal with a foreign language". So I'm sure you'll do fine with Indonesian, especially because the grammar is less important. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 248 of 568 11 July 2013 at 8:03am | IP Logged |
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Tarvos - That's the hope. :-)
Dutch Today I watched Turks Fruit with the boyf. It's a 1973 movie by Paul Verhoeven that won Best Dutch Film of the Century in 1999. Not the greatest I've seen recently, but pretty good, and sort of interesting in itself as a charmingly dated cultural document. Bonus: Rutger Hauer looks like He-Man. Oh, and I should probably update on the Super Challenge. It stands now at: Films/TV episodes: 70/100 Books: 3 "Books": 11 Indonesian For the past week I have been doing either Dutch or Indonesian every day, but not both. Still need to figure out a balance. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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