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learning the lingo
Nov. 8th, 2013 03:47 pmWhen I look back on the 7 years we spent in the Netherlands, I'm rather embarrassed how little Dutch we learned. Oh, I knew numbers so I could pay and make change, I could ask for half a kilo of lean bacon from the butcher (probably the first sentence I mastered), and all the usual pleasantries, but we never really had any use for the language. We were almost never in a situation where Dutch would've been the preferred language for conversing over English -- even if all the other participants were Dutch. As for reading, well, recipes are easy; letters from Immigration and Naturalisation are not, and I don't feel bad that I never mastered reading them when the secretarial staff at the ILLC often found them unclear!
The year we spent in Tilburg did help my conversational Dutch some; fewer people spoke English there, or were comfortable speaking it even if they could, and when you travel pretty much every where with an adorable baby, you learn to recognize and respond properly to all the usual questions "It's a girl, her name is Gwendolyn, she's X month's old, etc., etc., etc." I also started reading Gwen kids books in Dutch, and that helped both my pronunciation (Martijn and Wendy could listen to me read them without laughing) and some of my syntax.
We fully intend to take German lessons here...but we've been here 10 months and that hasn't happened yet. Nevertheless, I am surprised at how much more quickly I've developed conversational German to a level similar to that it took me 6 years to get to in Dutch; part of it is the meager German I had as a kid, part of it is having done this relatively recently with another language, part of it is that the other language I've done this with is close to German. But more than that, I have found I really appreciate the German approach to people who don't speak their language well. In the Netherlands, people either switch to English or don't pursue conversation any further. Here, people when they recognize that we're not natives, take an effort to speak slowly, clearly, and with helpful hand gestures, which in restricted contexts (e.g., picking up a package from the post office, or mailing one, or going to the bank, or ordering lunch) contribute immensely to comprehension, and also give me the confidence to try to respond with my meager German. And the more opportunities I have to do that, the more naturally it comes. I was pleased yesterday this morning to realize that the first thing that came into my head, and thus off my lips, when I got to daycare yesterday morning was "haben sie eine kart?" rather than "do you have your key-card?" (Most days, the door is locked, and you need a key-card to get in. They issue one card per family. Before I left for Cambridge in September, I gave the card to Joel. He swears I didn't. We've been cardless since then, but it's OK, since we usually arrive at the same time as others and can slip in with them. Though occasionally a crowd of half a dozen of us will be hanging around outside the door, none of us with our cards).
Of course, I'm learning German through Gwen. It took us a day or two realize that she was trying to tell us "fertig" at the end of the meals (most of the time her diction is quite good for someone her age. She has two words where she swaps consonants. "Music" is "Mukis". "Fertig" is...well, it sounds awfully like "fuckit"). She'll sing snatches of song, and last weekend I looked one of them up on youtube and we ended up following links to watch a number of other German nursery rhymes -- complete with captions -- which I'm sure will be as educational for me as to her. But for the most part, she's done pretty well with bifurcation of the languages; I'm not sure how much English she speaks at daycare, but I know she knows a lot more German than she uses at home. Occasionally we'll get "hund" and "katze", but honestly, since we use both "puppy" and "dog" and "cat" and "kitten" in English, how can I blame her for thinking "hund" and "katze" are just two more synonyms?
The year we spent in Tilburg did help my conversational Dutch some; fewer people spoke English there, or were comfortable speaking it even if they could, and when you travel pretty much every where with an adorable baby, you learn to recognize and respond properly to all the usual questions "It's a girl, her name is Gwendolyn, she's X month's old, etc., etc., etc." I also started reading Gwen kids books in Dutch, and that helped both my pronunciation (Martijn and Wendy could listen to me read them without laughing) and some of my syntax.
We fully intend to take German lessons here...but we've been here 10 months and that hasn't happened yet. Nevertheless, I am surprised at how much more quickly I've developed conversational German to a level similar to that it took me 6 years to get to in Dutch; part of it is the meager German I had as a kid, part of it is having done this relatively recently with another language, part of it is that the other language I've done this with is close to German. But more than that, I have found I really appreciate the German approach to people who don't speak their language well. In the Netherlands, people either switch to English or don't pursue conversation any further. Here, people when they recognize that we're not natives, take an effort to speak slowly, clearly, and with helpful hand gestures, which in restricted contexts (e.g., picking up a package from the post office, or mailing one, or going to the bank, or ordering lunch) contribute immensely to comprehension, and also give me the confidence to try to respond with my meager German. And the more opportunities I have to do that, the more naturally it comes. I was pleased yesterday this morning to realize that the first thing that came into my head, and thus off my lips, when I got to daycare yesterday morning was "haben sie eine kart?" rather than "do you have your key-card?" (Most days, the door is locked, and you need a key-card to get in. They issue one card per family. Before I left for Cambridge in September, I gave the card to Joel. He swears I didn't. We've been cardless since then, but it's OK, since we usually arrive at the same time as others and can slip in with them. Though occasionally a crowd of half a dozen of us will be hanging around outside the door, none of us with our cards).
Of course, I'm learning German through Gwen. It took us a day or two realize that she was trying to tell us "fertig" at the end of the meals (most of the time her diction is quite good for someone her age. She has two words where she swaps consonants. "Music" is "Mukis". "Fertig" is...well, it sounds awfully like "fuckit"). She'll sing snatches of song, and last weekend I looked one of them up on youtube and we ended up following links to watch a number of other German nursery rhymes -- complete with captions -- which I'm sure will be as educational for me as to her. But for the most part, she's done pretty well with bifurcation of the languages; I'm not sure how much English she speaks at daycare, but I know she knows a lot more German than she uses at home. Occasionally we'll get "hund" and "katze", but honestly, since we use both "puppy" and "dog" and "cat" and "kitten" in English, how can I blame her for thinking "hund" and "katze" are just two more synonyms?
