Monday, September 24, 2012

Nederlands II

Goedemiddag!

I'm falling in love with the Dutch language. Seriously. It's ease and massive amounts of English cognates make it a breeze to pick up.

This third lesson first gave me the male and female ways to say American (Amerikaans and Amerikaanse) and the male and female ways to say that a person is Dutch (Nederlander and Nederlandser).

I have to spend the rest of this entry discussing the importance of the next two words I learned, and also that these were the only other two words that I learned.

"Ik ben" and "en"

"I am" and "and"

Super simple, but super important. Think about how many times during a conversation that you tell someone "I am......" or use "and" as a conjunction. Now that I have these simple and small, yet enormous words, I can actually start being to "Show ownership of my feelings" like they tell you to do when handling confrontations.

This helps a lot because I try to follow people from the various foreign languages that I'm studying, and of course I have some Dutch speakers on my timeline, and quite frequently I see "Ik ben....." Now that I know what it means, I can focus on what's coming AFTER the "ben". I guess what I'm trying to say is that knowing how to use the various forms of "am" and "be" can unlock a massive door. You might not be able to say much initially after learning how to say I am, but all you need to do after that is to just learn adjectives, verbs, and conjugations (and we all know what joy that is..lol).

I just realized that I learned how to say "but" also..(Maar). That word is is just as important, because now it allows you to form a response to someone or something.

Out of all the languages out there, I never thought I'd be liking Dutch this much. It's awesome. I can't wait to learn more!

Constructive comments, tips, advice, and whatever else are more than welcome!

Tot ziens,

Your Favorite Polyglot,
Twitter @mistercapoeira

No comments:

Post a Comment