Moving

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.