Dutch class has been quite the deal. There are about 90 students total this year, divided into groups of around 18. Four of the groups are for students with a good grasp of English. The other group is for the German students. They are doing an accelerated program because German is so close to Dutch in sentence structure and vocabulary that they have an advantage. They are going through the whole book and the English classes are only going through half or two-thirds of the book. They also have a harder test at the end of the class though, so I guess that I can live with being slower.
We have three weeks of classes and we will have three different kinds of exams to determine if we pass. (1) We will have a listening exam where we will have to listen to a conversation and then answer a series of questions about who said what and what the conversation was about. (2)We will have an oral exam in which we will have to carry on a conversation in Dutch. (3)We will have a written exam in which we will have to conjugate verbs, do short sentence answers, and write an essay of some kind. It should be delightful.
The group I am in is very global: there are students from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia, Belarus, and Brazil and two students each from Lithuania, the US, and France. Everybody speaks English pretty well so I am feeling a little underachieving.
I have learned that I should have come from a different place and should have studied something different. Every morning we carry on little conversations which include those questions and, in Dutch, the US is "Verenigde Staten" (which is amazingly difficult to remember how to say correctly) and "history" is "geschiedenis" which is also quite complicated. (In Dutch "sch" does not make a "sh" sound but something more like "sgk".)
The teacher is quite good. She is of Dutch extraction but she grew up in Indonesia on a rubber plantation until all of the Dutch folk were kicked out during the move for Indonesian independence. One of her favorite answers to students questions about why the language is the way it is is to say "Nobody knows, it doesn't make any sense, you just have to memorize it." Her other favorite answer is "Dutch people are lazy about talking" which is why you can randomly drop verbs out of sentences (for spoken Dutch but not for written Dutch) and still be perfectly correct.
We are also getting some Dutch culture thrown in as part of the lesson. On Wednesday, for instance, as a preparation for the listening exam, we listened to a Dutch drinking song, while reading the lyrics. It had a definite Russian feel to is (the Lithuanians both commented on it) and it was about vodka, except that in Dutch it is spelled with a "w", so you have to imagine Chekov saying "wodka" to get the whole picture. A sample of the lyrics follows:
"I love you, I love you,
I don't know what I'm saying
But I love you.
Give me one more glass of vodka.
I need one more glass of vodka
So that I can tell you that I love you."
In Dutch the word for "verb" is "werkwoord" which means "work word" and every time I see it I keep singing "I'm a verb, verb, verb/I'm an action word" in my head.
Also, even though loads of stuff in the Netherlands is about Orange--there are "Oranjeplein"s and "Oranjelaan"s and "Oranjehaven"s all over the place--in honor of the House of Orange, you cannot buy an orange in the store. You have to buy a "sinosappel" instead. Apparently, at least the story goes, when the Dutch, who were trading with the Chinese for eons (almost), received a shipload of round, orange fruit they had no idea what it was but, knowing apples quite well, decided that they must be a kind of Chinese apple and centuries of lazy Dutch linguistics has reduced it to "sinosappel". Which makes orange juice "sinosappelsap".
So far, though, my favorite thing about Dutch is the "@". In English (at least as far as I know) we just call it an "at sign". In Dutch, the name is "apestaartje". The actual translation of the Dutch word for "@" is "little monkey tail." !!!!!!!!!
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