Our teacher, Marjolein Vierhout, was definitely the best teacher. I thought that she was very good and, from what I heard, other teachers this year were using more "progressive" teaching methods. For instance, prepositions are difficult. They are very difficult in Dutch and they don't really translate directly from English. In at least one of the other classes, the teacher had the students acting out the prepositions. So you would say "op de tafel" and climb onto the table, "onder de tafel" and crawl under it, "aan de tafel" and sit at the table. While I don't doubt the efficacy of this approach (if "School House Rock" has taught us anything it's that these kinds of things work), I do think that 30 years old is far too old an age to have to be jumping around and climbing on the furniture in class.
One of the other complicated things about Dutch is that while English uses loads and loads of simple pasts ("I went to the library") Dutch almost always uses past perfects ("I have gone to the library"). Possibly because it sounds cooler. But it does make sentence structure more complicated. Simple past: ("I went to the library") "Ik ging naar de bibliotheek"; past perfect ("I have gone to the library") "Ik ben naar de bibliotheek geweest." There are very specific rules about when you are allowed to use the simple past and I still haven't quite figured them out--they are the kind of rules where you just kind of have to know how to use them and it is hard to learn them.
Dutch also doesn't really use the future tense (or at least it doesn't at the "advanced beginner's" level). You just use the present tense and rely on context: "I go to the library tomorrow." This sort of makes it easier, because you don't have to remember extra conjugation, but, for me at least, there is always a second's catch where I am trying to remember how to make things future before I remember that I don't have to.
One thing I have learned, though, is that, at least in the Netherlands, language teachers do not think very highly of the Rosetta Stone language programs. In the Dutch program that I did, there were a couple of places were there were actual errors in the program and I learned something wrong (that would have to have been when I was paying attention) and there were other places where they used archaic or regional words or phrases which aren't generally used in most places.
Before we took the exam, our teacher gave everybody these little lady-bug candies "for luck". I think that they look a little too bug-like for candy but I suppose that chocolate is chocolate.
Also, after the final exam, I went and picked up my student ID and I also got a welcome pack that included a map of Rotterdam (it still wasn't one that included Zuid-Rotterdam), some informational things, some VVV (tourist bureau) things, and these little things:
Little wooden clog key-chains! Aren't they cute?
One of the other students (who is going to the law school) picked up her bag as well and she only had one pair. She was very sad. It turns out that the little orange ones were given out by the University.
These little blue ones were given out by the School of History, Society, and Culture, which is the faculty with which I am studying, so score!
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