Hello everyone. It’s Toni and I’m back with a new update on my Dutch lessons! These lessons that Piece of Dutch and ISW offered have been an amazing experience and I am sad to say we only have a few weeks left. Lessons have started to be more challenging since we are covering the last chapters of the book. Our Dutch teacher Debbie wanted to quiz Pea and me on our vocabulary so we competed a little bit against each other, which was fun and a great motivator. I also managed to sneak in a “small“, two-week trip to Croatia and took my online lessons from there so stay tuned if you want to hear more about it!
All These Languages
We started this month with lesson 7 called “Waar woon je“ or “Where do you live“. This was a relatively difficult lesson for me since I just arrived in Zagreb the night before so I was not well rested. There was a lot of new vocabulary as well like different furniture and their relations to other objects in the room. I learned to describe my room and to use verbs like liggen (to lie/be situated), zitten (to sit) or staan (to stand) to say where something is. You don’t use the same verbs if the object is on the floor or on the bed, which confused me a little bit since while speaking Croatian we rarely use those verbs. It’s interesting to see that as time moves on and I learn more Dutch, it gets increasingly difficult to separate all three languages in my head (NL-EN-CRO).
It All Comes Back To Housing
For some lessons, English is the perfect language to use as a basis for translating while for others, I have to use Croatian wording and sentences. In the beginning, it was very useful but now I sometimes say Dutch sentences in Croatian order which sounds completely incorrect and vice versa.
Even my family told me that I sometimes sound like a stranger because I use English words in my Croatian plus I put them in a weird order! Of course, that is part of the process when learning a third language but it’s funny to hear my self, speak sometimes. Now add 2 separate Croatian dialects I grew up in and you get a brain filled with screws every time I try to form a sentence. Luckily, I have a great teacher that was very patient and helped me with everything. We used a little drawing of a “huis met negen verdieping“ that had some kind of a scene or room on each floor that we described. We also learned what are the usual styles of houses in the Netherlands like “galerijflat“, “portiekflat“ and “apartment “. Hopefully, I will have a place of my own in the Netherlands one day too!
Holiday Vocab
Our next lesson was about holidays and talking what you did on the weekend, which came in absolutely perfect time since I was tuning in to my lessons from Croatia. Debbie showed ushow to use past participle to describe what we did in the past. This was also just a tiny bit stressful because it started to look more and more like German but at the end, it was mutch simpler.
Debbie quizzed us for the first time as well and that went all sorts of ways. I didn’t do very well so she decided to give us more time until next lesson but then we had to be perfect! My vacation threw me off balance and if I am being honest, I really didn’t prepare enough for that class. Luckily, our teacher was very supporting and didn’t let me get demotivated. We continued with the lessons and learned how to say different activites like sunbathing, swimming, eating ice cream and so on. Sadly, a few days after that it was my time to pack and leave the sunny Croatia so the sunbathing and eating ice cream had to come to an end. Never the less, I was happy to be going back to my friends and collegues!
