20 january 2005
The first week was a week of disorientation. The second week was a week of exploration. The third week has been a week of working my ass off.
My intensive Dutch class happens every weekday morning from nine until one. We are expected to do at least three hours of homework each night. Already in six lessons we have covered about what I learned in two years of high school French. Have I mentioned recently my ongoing resentment for American language education?
There are eleven students in my class: two from the US, and one each from Peru, Cuba, Spain, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Africa, the UK, Yemen, and Poland. Half of us are students at the University of Amsterdam, and the other half are people with jobs or significant others that require some knowledge of Dutch.
Each morning we gather in a small classroom to order hypothetical coffees and pizzas, and to speak in short sentences about what time it is and what kind of furniture we have. After about three remarks on any of these topics, our vocabulary is exhausted. Yesterday we wrote happy birthday postcards to each other. The one I received read, loosely translated, Dear Jenn, Happy birthday. How old are you becoming? I live in Amsterdam. Today is Tuesday.
Dutch is easier to read than other languages I have encountered, including Spanish. The conjugations, for example, are straightforward and regular. And you often encounter words like appel, melk, brood. But hearing or speaking Dutch is an entirely different matter. The pronunciation is completely unintuitive: every vowel makes a sound that approximates, but is not quite the same as, a different vowel in English. (I’m going to make a reference to at least one stunningly mediocre 90s movie each week. Does anyone remember the party planner character in the Steve Martin remake of Father of the Bride? It’s like that.) So a Dutch “ee” is almost like an English “ay,” but not quite. You can’t just read it as “ay” and get away with it. And while seeing the word “brood” on a textbook page under a cute little picture labeled “de bakker” might lead one to believe this is just like silly English, it is another matter entirely to hear it out loud, when the “r” is trilled and the “oo” sounds like an “oh” morphing into an “uh.” Likewise for attempting to generate the word oneself.
The upside to all this effort is that if you do manage to speak Dutch properly, it has the familiar cadence of German but with a bubbly Nordic musicality. It is really sexy. Not a candlelight Italian / French kind of sexy, but a cute, hot, Milla Jovovich in the Fifth Element kind of sexy. And Milla has been on the (explicitly stated or implicitly understood) Five People You’re Definitely Allowed to Cheat With List of, at minimum, two people I’ve dated.
I guess the other part of the upside is that I will actually be able to communicate in Dutch, and to understand some of the Dutch publications I am rapidly accumulating for my thesis. At some point I hope to graduate from Papa Wapper en het rode vrachtwagentje (Papa Wapper and his little red firetruck) to Vier visies op een waterfront (Four visions on a waterfront).
When I am both Milla sexy and well versed in local urban planning issues, then and only then will I feel that all this pizza ordering has paid off.
My intensive Dutch class happens every weekday morning from nine until one. We are expected to do at least three hours of homework each night. Already in six lessons we have covered about what I learned in two years of high school French. Have I mentioned recently my ongoing resentment for American language education?
There are eleven students in my class: two from the US, and one each from Peru, Cuba, Spain, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Africa, the UK, Yemen, and Poland. Half of us are students at the University of Amsterdam, and the other half are people with jobs or significant others that require some knowledge of Dutch.
Each morning we gather in a small classroom to order hypothetical coffees and pizzas, and to speak in short sentences about what time it is and what kind of furniture we have. After about three remarks on any of these topics, our vocabulary is exhausted. Yesterday we wrote happy birthday postcards to each other. The one I received read, loosely translated, Dear Jenn, Happy birthday. How old are you becoming? I live in Amsterdam. Today is Tuesday.
Dutch is easier to read than other languages I have encountered, including Spanish. The conjugations, for example, are straightforward and regular. And you often encounter words like appel, melk, brood. But hearing or speaking Dutch is an entirely different matter. The pronunciation is completely unintuitive: every vowel makes a sound that approximates, but is not quite the same as, a different vowel in English. (I’m going to make a reference to at least one stunningly mediocre 90s movie each week. Does anyone remember the party planner character in the Steve Martin remake of Father of the Bride? It’s like that.) So a Dutch “ee” is almost like an English “ay,” but not quite. You can’t just read it as “ay” and get away with it. And while seeing the word “brood” on a textbook page under a cute little picture labeled “de bakker” might lead one to believe this is just like silly English, it is another matter entirely to hear it out loud, when the “r” is trilled and the “oo” sounds like an “oh” morphing into an “uh.” Likewise for attempting to generate the word oneself.
The upside to all this effort is that if you do manage to speak Dutch properly, it has the familiar cadence of German but with a bubbly Nordic musicality. It is really sexy. Not a candlelight Italian / French kind of sexy, but a cute, hot, Milla Jovovich in the Fifth Element kind of sexy. And Milla has been on the (explicitly stated or implicitly understood) Five People You’re Definitely Allowed to Cheat With List of, at minimum, two people I’ve dated.
I guess the other part of the upside is that I will actually be able to communicate in Dutch, and to understand some of the Dutch publications I am rapidly accumulating for my thesis. At some point I hope to graduate from Papa Wapper en het rode vrachtwagentje (Papa Wapper and his little red firetruck) to Vier visies op een waterfront (Four visions on a waterfront).
When I am both Milla sexy and well versed in local urban planning issues, then and only then will I feel that all this pizza ordering has paid off.
posted by tortaluga at 7:34 AM
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