Posts Tagged With: Dutch language

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!

Last night when I was working on the blog post, I knew that the proper phrase for the first image was Waar is Nederland? It’s a very simple phrase and Nederland is the Dutch name for the Netherlands. So I took a screenshot, re-sized it in Photoshop, and then added on the appropriate text.

And then I second guessed myself. It is the internet, after all. Put your best foot forward, since it’s there forever. Or however long blogs will be around. So I went to Google and did a phrase search for “Waar is Nederland?” within the quote marks to force Google to search for it as an exact phrase (very useful tool, says this librarian!). It returned about 30,000 results, and that seemed low to me. Of course, that’s probably because people who speak Dutch know where the Netherlands is, but I digress…

And then I decided to try “Waar is het Nederlands”. Don’t ask me why, since I was right on the first attempt all on my own. But it’s that fear of being wrong, that fear of someone who speaks native Dutch realizing… you’ll start to go to any attempt to hide your wrongness. That gave me about 475,000 results — a lot more than my first search.

Of course, at this point I should have realized it was because I wasn’t searching for the basic question any more. It was more like Where is the Dutch <noun>? rather than the country itself! But still, I re-did the picture, against any misgivings, and posted it. It’s not the first time Google has struck out.

That’s not to say, of course, that Google doesn’t have a lot of advantages. You have Google translate. You can download a Firefox plugin to translate any highlighted phrase by right clicking. And there is some other things that may or may not be from Google, like the automatic translate option when someone posts a Dutch comment on Facebook which I see. I even heard that someone has been reading my blog in translated Dutch (which of course means that it was pretty gibberish at times!)

I suppose the morale of the story is to trust my gut and not believe Google all the time. But also to take more risks – I have to figure this out somehow, and December is fast approaching. It’s not that I think I ‘ll be fluent by that (ha!) but rather than I would like to at least get the basics down and hold a conversation or two early on.

But anyway, let’s hear it for the Dutch language. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to roll my R’s… that would shock my Spanish teacher, that’s for sure!