Moving

Here we are at Sunday night once more. Saturday was a visit to the New York Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, though that is a post for another day. Today was more football (NFL) — just the way I like it.

Of course, to get to that point I had to some errands and chores around the house, but at least I have perfected the art of going to the laundromat, waiting for the stuff to be put into the dryer, and then walking further on to the grocery store to do some quick shopping. I made it back with 8 minutes to spare! I only forgot the bread (boo) but a quick trip to the deli fixed that.

I will say that the progress with learning the Dutch language is not going as fast as I would have hoped at the 3 month mark, but at least I am currently enjoying it. I am somewhere buried deep in the word order section of dutchgrammar.com.

Here’s a sample of what I stare at almost nightly:

Image from dutchgrammar.com (click image to be taken to page where things are explained)

Of course, at this point I have finished all three of these sections and am not dealing with things outside of this format, like making sentences negative using niet.

Here was one of the more interesting blog posts that I read recently:

(Not Just Another) Weekend by Unquiet Time

– On Taptoe, a band festival; on cranes poised on river barges tipping over; and on being offered a job as a Delft tour guide.

For “fun” I decided to research word order within the Dutch language. Most of the resources i have looked at tend to put word order at the end, for whatever reason. Since I was trying to finish resources in order (usually) I didn’t skip to that section.

But no more! I told myself this weekend that I was going to start looking at the order of words within a sentence. I did a pretty decent chunk of it using dutchgrammar.com, but there is always more to go. Right now I am stuck somewhere in the many uses of Er.

Of course, nothing is ever as simple as shown in that sentence diagram (shown here), but it’s pretty decent.

As most of my friends know, I do like my routine. But this week, due to various coworkers all deciding to go on vacation during the same two weeks, there is only anti-routine. I have to work nights rather than days. Thankfully the library closes 3 hours earlier in the summer, or this would be even worse.

But it’s so hard to tell my body Sleep in past 6am. Please. You know you (don’t) want to. So I went to bed after midnight, and up by 6. Not cool at all. And if I was at work right now, I’d be enjoying a cup of tea! (We always have a tea break at 9:30 in the morning. No, I don’t live in England.) On the plus side, I answered a lot of emails, took a shower, and am writing this blog post very early in the day. And after this, it is time to study Dutch a bit before my ride comes.

Lately Marco and I have been trying a new tactic – he gives me specific sentences to study (he also found audio files online for these sentences), and then when we meet up on videochat, we go over them. Sometimes the first time he says the sentence, I have no idea what he just said. But then he slows it down a bit and I get it. But of course these sentences are full of tongue twisters and Dutch sayings which don’t translate literally, so even Google translate isn’t always a help to me. But I do feel like my speech is slowly improving, though it is definitely baby steps.

Here are some interesting blog posts that I came across today while trying desperately to catch up:

Molen van Sloten, by Ghoti Industries

Post about the only public windmill in the Netherlands which even lets you go inside. Apparently pretty close to Amsterdam. I put it into my Chrome folder for “places to visit” someday.

Een dagje naar het strand (A day at the beach), by Fronz

Some nice photos, especially the first one. It looked like a very relaxing day.

One of the more random things I have been doing lately is studying tegenstellingen, or opposites in Dutch. It has mostly been helpful.

This was one page of the 6 or so pages of notes. Some of them are easier than others. Like stroef is rough, and glad is smooth. But good luck pronouncing glad if you’re not used to speaking Dutch. It’s not easy!

It seems that I have moved out of the “Other conjugations” section of dutchgrammar.com and into the irregular verbs section. Eek!

At first I was a bit concerned, since you are hit with a longgg list of irregular verbs which never seems to end. But then the following page showed the conjugation patterns, which helped to put things into like groups. So far I worked on two groups: e-ie-o and ie-oo-o.

It just goes on, and on, and…

The verb on the left is the infinitive (i.e. helpen = to help). The next column is for the singular past form, and the following columns (not shown) are for the plural past and the past participle. Those are the main things you need to memorize – single past, plural past, and past participle – since generally the present form is regular and there are only two forms in the simple past (singular and plural).

So basically, the past tense is the culprit. What dutchgrammar.com does is group like verbs together. So helpen, sterven, and werpen are in the same group: e – ie – o.

Infinitive: helpen, sterven, and werpen

Singular past: hielp, stierf*, and wierp

Plural past: hielpen, stierven, and wierpen

Past participle: geholpen, gestorven, and geworpen

* = in this form, v becomes f.

Next step – make flash cards for each group. But not tonight, so maybe this weekend.