More Dutch
Jul. 8th, 2003 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslI've been reading Dutch texts rather comfortably now, with the aid of a dictionary.
I've decided to use a sentence-aligned parallel corpus of Dutch and English in order to skip the dictionary, but the text is boring and it's hard to keep your eyes on two separate texts.
Yesterday, I met a group of young Dutch tourists at the beach. This was the first time I met Dutch people after studying Dutch, so I had a long conversation with them. They were nice and seemed entertained by me too, so it worked out well. I could pick out different accent features between them, like "s" vs "sh", "ei" vs "ai", "r" vs "R", though I understood almost nothing of what they said to each other as well as most of what they said to me. Learned very important curse words.
I am now at the stage where it's easier to speak than to understand. This will probably reverse once I'm living there, and I get accustomed to the way they say things, and I'll be struggling with expressing myself.
There is no question that speaking English is at least half of the way to speaking Dutch.
I've decided to use a sentence-aligned parallel corpus of Dutch and English in order to skip the dictionary, but the text is boring and it's hard to keep your eyes on two separate texts.
Yesterday, I met a group of young Dutch tourists at the beach. This was the first time I met Dutch people after studying Dutch, so I had a long conversation with them. They were nice and seemed entertained by me too, so it worked out well. I could pick out different accent features between them, like "s" vs "sh", "ei" vs "ai", "r" vs "R", though I understood almost nothing of what they said to each other as well as most of what they said to me. Learned very important curse words.
I am now at the stage where it's easier to speak than to understand. This will probably reverse once I'm living there, and I get accustomed to the way they say things, and I'll be struggling with expressing myself.
There is no question that speaking English is at least half of the way to speaking Dutch.