Learning Dutch

Number of days (straight) I have studied Dutch: 1.

Ha! Back to “1” from 0. Technically I guess it could be a 2, because I did stare at some things yesterday, but I didn’t get anywhere fast and gave up pretty quickly (wasn’t feeling that well). I had planned to try to make some digital flashcards to review all of the verb tenses that I have learned (see below for the summary) but ended up nixing that idea for now.

Today I looked at two sections at dutchgrammar.com.

1.) Summary of the 8 ‘basic’ Dutch tenses: present tense, past tense, present perfect, pluperfect [past perfect!], future, conditional, future perfect, and conditional perfect.

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I’ve decided that pluperfect is a very interesting English word. English might have been my major in college, but even I admit it’s hard to remember what the pluperfect tense does exactly. I don’t recommend going to Wikipedia, since the language pages tend to be a bit too much.

So I looked up some other random websites and determined that it is an action which occurred before a point in the past. I had already gone outside when he came home. I think this tense would be a lot easier to remember if it was always called ‘past perfect’ rather than ‘pluperfect’ – you see it mentioned both ways.

For the Dutch version I looked at Dutchgrammar. It didn’t seem that different after all – you also use the pluperfect in Dutch when you want to refer to an event that occurred before another past event. Most verbs use the past tense of hebben (to have) with the verb’s past participle. – ik had gewerkt. I had worked. Occasionally you use zijn (to be) instead – ik was gevallen – I had fallen.

Final verdict: Think of it as ‘past perfect’ rather than ‘pluperfect’.

The pluperfect was last night. Tonight was the (simple) future. As this tense doesn’t need participles, it already seemed easier! There are generally two verbs which are used – zullen (i.e. ik zal or I shall) and gaan (to go). Generally if you are promising something, or you give the probability something will happen, or you use it within an if-then conditional…

If you give a mouse a cookie, then he will want a glass of milk. If you give a mouse a glass of milk… Als je een muis een koekje geeft, wil hij ook een glas melk. (Google says this might be a Dutch proverb?) Regardless, one of my favorite if-then books.

…then you use zullen. Otherwise, if you’re not promising anything, or giving a specific frame of reference when it will happen (today, tomorrow, next month), or you aren’t using an if/then startement, you can use gaan (to go – so ‘I am going to go to the club’).

Verdict: Makes sense to me. Now let’s see if it sticks . . .

There’s more mentioned at the Dutchgrammar pages, but I’ll leave that for you to find!

I had a weird experience today. I had to go to the mall (3rd time in 3 weeks, but thankfully for the last time) to pick up my annual supply of contact lens. On the way home, I decided to take a different type of bus since a bus driver had given me a free ticket for it. It’s a longer ride but it came earlier. And it was free, of course.

Inside the bus, like most things, all of the information was both in English and Spanish. There was an advertisement for Rockland county’s public library system. The Spanish read something like descubrir todo en la biblioteca en Rockland. I was very confused. “Discover everything and the library and Rockland?” I kept reading it over and over again, feeling lost.

And then I glanced at the English version, which was a bit further away. My mistake quickly became apparent.

I was reading “en” as and — which is the Dutch translation.

However, in Spanish, “en” means in. Discover everything in the library in Rockland.

Mind you, my Spanish was never that good considering how long I studied it in school, but I could read it fairly decently. But this was the first time that the Dutch has taken precedence over Spanish in my mind. And it was a great feeling!

A few days ago I was looking at the past tense in Dutch — something that I do not really have much experience with as that is about where my verb studying stopped. So far I have just barely gotten into the basics of it, but I did remember hearing about ‘t fokschaap, or the phrase you need to remember for the past tense of Dutch verbs.

In the past tense, there are two types of verbs. the -d verbs and the -t verbs. All of the -t verbs are contained within the consonants of ‘t fokschaap, or t, f, k, s, c, h, and p. If the crude stem of the verb ends in one of those consonants, it is a -t verb. For the English speaking among us, you could also memorize pocket fish as suggested by the writers over at dutchgrammar.com, but I find the vowels harder to ignore within that phrase.

Note that above I said crude stem. That is basically taking the infinitive of a verb (to sleep = slapen) and removing the -en from the verb to get slaap (a double “a” pattern to keep the syllable long). Thus the crude stem ends in p, so it is a -t verb. For more on the crude stem versus final stem, look at this link.

In other news, the weather is lovely on this side of the ocean, although we are looking at rain tomorrow and this coming week, along with cooler temperatures for a while. I think I only had to wear my jacket on one of the mornings this past week so I really cannot complain!

I had a half productive half lazy Saturday. Errands took about 5 hours (laundry, grocery shopping, and grabbing rent) but the rest of the afternoon was spent watching golf and Tiger Woods retaining his #1 lead and watching the March Madness basketball tournament.

Lazy Saturdays. I approve.

Back to the Monday drag! Though Tuesday is almost here already.

A little milestone was reached yesterday. Emphasis on minor, but it still made my day! I realized that I had finished the Spelling & Pronunciation section over at dutchgrammar.com. Of course it had a lot of components within it, so it took about 2 months to get through (or perhaps a bit less).

Amusingly, the “summary” page at the end of the entire section was inexplicably only one page long. I am not quite sure how the writer(s) condensed it that far but somehow they did. Of course it was only the major highlights.

The next section is Verbs… which should be very interesting considering I really never got past the present and present perfect tenses when I was learning Dutch for the first go around. But now it moves into past tense, future tense, future perfect, the conditional… you get the idea. And if that wasn’t enough, after that is the irregular verbs which don’t follow any sane rule. The verbs section is about twice as long as the spelling section, so I figure I will finish it sometime around June at this rate. This would be easier if I I had more hours in the day!

The nice thing about this type of studying is I am trying to take a lot of notes (in an old college-ruled notebook I bought during my time at Rutgers). I have found that it really helps me remember things when I write them down.

Of course I can’t hold a conversation in Dutch for the life of me (so far) but hopefully this will start sticking soon. I think things will get a bit easier over the summer. Work tends to be a lot less hectic so I don’t come home automatically drained. Here’s hoping!