Current Music: Ilse de Lange – “When We Don’t Talk”
Hellooooo!
Gave W another English lesson today. He went to Berlin over the holidays and didn’t do so well with the English there, according to him, although his children were fine with it – therefore he’s finally beginning to accept what I’ve been telling him from the start, that he needs help in casual conversational English, not written formal English like these education articles are. So I’m going to hunt down some English-print magazines with ‘normal’ writing in them so we can read aloud and discuss. That’s a relief for me as well as being the right thing for him – quite frankly, those articles, while readable, bored me to tears. But he’s a very pleasant conversation partner in normal interaction. Today I basically sat there and talked for an hour and a half – he wanted to practice his listening skills because he’d had trouble with the headphone-tour at the museum in Berlin – so I talked about Christmas and New Year’s and my family being here. I asked him once if I was talking too fast and he said no, that he understood every word. (He was proud of himself, I could see.) I tend to ‘talk with my hands’ a lot and ‘dramatize’ things (dialogue, etc.), as everybody who knows me knows, plus I talk loudly, so maybe that helps.
But he’s still thinking in Dutch – I know that because he transfers Dutch mistakes over to English, most notably substituting ‘as’ for ‘than’, e.g. ‘My children were better with the English as me’. (Which comes from the growing tendency of Dutch speakers to err and say ‘groter ALS ik’ instead of ‘groter DAN ik’.) However, he does say ‘me’ instead of ‘I’, so that’s something. I mean, of course ‘I’ is the technically grammatical way, but nobody talks like that, so at least he does something casually, unconsciously, going on ‘feel’ without a conscious translation.
Speaking of which, I just find it so weird, all the things that I know unconsciously in Dutch and never knew I knew. I’ve said this before, but every once in a while it still surprises me. Endings of -en, for example – I was thinking about that on the train today. Simply explained for the English speakers: there are certain times (very often, actually – at least when the adjective comes before a noun) when an adjective takes an ‘e’ on the end, such as ‘de mooie auto (‘the beautiful car’) – but not when there’s an adjective with -en, like ‘afgelopen’. You don’t say ‘het afgelopene jaar’ (‘the past year’), that’s just wrong, it’s ‘het afgelopen jaar’ with no E. And when we were given an exercise like this one in class, I knew it was wrong – I knew automatically how almost all of them should be done – but didn’t know why. I had just never thought about it. ((Note: one counter-example that I thought of: ‘gemeen’. You can say, for example, ‘mijn gemene zus’ (‘my mean sister’). Maybe it only works with participles.)) They say this unconscious learning doesn’t really happen anymore after puberty, but with me it seems to, at least some of the time. I mean, you can be taught something and do it correctly enough times that it begins to sound right to you, of course – but if I’m not still capable of unconscious learning, how do I instinctively know things like the ‘e’ and the placement of the word ‘er’ before they’ve been formally taught to me? I mean, I don’t do it right 100% of the time, but often enough that it’s no coincidence. I couldn’t let myself pay too much attention when we had the ‘five uses of ‘er’’ lecture at Boswell – if I think too much about it, I’ll do it wrong. I just have to let it come out.
Because I’m learning differently now than I used to – back at UF I used to consciously think word by word, committing things to memory – word order, ‘concrete’ translations, etc. But now I can just scan a sentence, and if it’s something unfamiliar, I just think ‘harder’ for a second – hard to explain – I don’t think anything specifically, I just feel like I’m stamping the ‘pattern’ on my brain – and then the next time, nine times out of ten I’ll do it right, whatever it is. There are a lot of words in my brain now that don’t ‘carry’ translations with them in my thought process – like ‘overstappen’, for example, or ‘gezellig’, or ‘indrukwekkend’. There are mental images, impressions of exactly what they mean and how they should be used, but no English word jumps up and tags along with it. And I’m saying more and more stuff that I didn’t even have conscious knowledge of. Yesterday I was talking to the TV the way I always do during GTST, saying something about a character, and then I said, “Waar slaat dat nou op?” The next minute, I heard my own words, and I understood them, but I couldn’t have translated it into English if you paid me. The closest thing is probably ‘well, what sense does THAT make?’, but the point is it just fell out without me thinking about it and I had never said that before. And I have no idea where I learned it. That happens every once in a while, and it’s exciting. Is this just me, or does this point happen to everyone who learns a language?
Sorry, I’ll shut up now. It’s just exciting to be able to use myself as a test subject for language acquisition, seeing as I’m studying that very thing right now…
Anyway, other news. Saw P after all on Wednesday (actually Thursday, we met at Schiphol at 2 AM, haha). Got back to Utrecht early Thursday evening and did my usual eat-TV-computer-book thing… and today I got up at 7 to go to Doetinchem for W’s lesson. Oh yeah, and I found that book I wanted - Het veilige huis by Nicci French. I went into Bruma because I thought you could get stamps there. Didn’t see any stamps but did see that book, so I bought it. But I have GOT to figure out how to get that application to La Mancha, pronto. I’ll ask Yvon and Ted on Monday if I can fax it.
Not much else to tell. T and I have a ‘movie date’ Monday night, and then I have another lesson with W on Friday so I’ve got to scrape up some English reading material. And fast… the only English magazine I have here is Cosmopolitan hahaha… Oh wait! Oh oh oh… I just looked at my shelf of books and I have a GREAT idea!!! The UnDutchables!!! That would be a great thing to read from – it’s funny, casual, and interesting, and it’s about a subject he knows about. Go Jess! *pats self on back*
Going to heat up the last of my mac and cheese now…
Hellooooo!
Gave W another English lesson today. He went to Berlin over the holidays and didn’t do so well with the English there, according to him, although his children were fine with it – therefore he’s finally beginning to accept what I’ve been telling him from the start, that he needs help in casual conversational English, not written formal English like these education articles are. So I’m going to hunt down some English-print magazines with ‘normal’ writing in them so we can read aloud and discuss. That’s a relief for me as well as being the right thing for him – quite frankly, those articles, while readable, bored me to tears. But he’s a very pleasant conversation partner in normal interaction. Today I basically sat there and talked for an hour and a half – he wanted to practice his listening skills because he’d had trouble with the headphone-tour at the museum in Berlin – so I talked about Christmas and New Year’s and my family being here. I asked him once if I was talking too fast and he said no, that he understood every word. (He was proud of himself, I could see.) I tend to ‘talk with my hands’ a lot and ‘dramatize’ things (dialogue, etc.), as everybody who knows me knows, plus I talk loudly, so maybe that helps.
But he’s still thinking in Dutch – I know that because he transfers Dutch mistakes over to English, most notably substituting ‘as’ for ‘than’, e.g. ‘My children were better with the English as me’. (Which comes from the growing tendency of Dutch speakers to err and say ‘groter ALS ik’ instead of ‘groter DAN ik’.) However, he does say ‘me’ instead of ‘I’, so that’s something. I mean, of course ‘I’ is the technically grammatical way, but nobody talks like that, so at least he does something casually, unconsciously, going on ‘feel’ without a conscious translation.
Speaking of which, I just find it so weird, all the things that I know unconsciously in Dutch and never knew I knew. I’ve said this before, but every once in a while it still surprises me. Endings of -en, for example – I was thinking about that on the train today. Simply explained for the English speakers: there are certain times (very often, actually – at least when the adjective comes before a noun) when an adjective takes an ‘e’ on the end, such as ‘de mooie auto (‘the beautiful car’) – but not when there’s an adjective with -en, like ‘afgelopen’. You don’t say ‘het afgelopene jaar’ (‘the past year’), that’s just wrong, it’s ‘het afgelopen jaar’ with no E. And when we were given an exercise like this one in class, I knew it was wrong – I knew automatically how almost all of them should be done – but didn’t know why. I had just never thought about it. ((Note: one counter-example that I thought of: ‘gemeen’. You can say, for example, ‘mijn gemene zus’ (‘my mean sister’). Maybe it only works with participles.)) They say this unconscious learning doesn’t really happen anymore after puberty, but with me it seems to, at least some of the time. I mean, you can be taught something and do it correctly enough times that it begins to sound right to you, of course – but if I’m not still capable of unconscious learning, how do I instinctively know things like the ‘e’ and the placement of the word ‘er’ before they’ve been formally taught to me? I mean, I don’t do it right 100% of the time, but often enough that it’s no coincidence. I couldn’t let myself pay too much attention when we had the ‘five uses of ‘er’’ lecture at Boswell – if I think too much about it, I’ll do it wrong. I just have to let it come out.
Because I’m learning differently now than I used to – back at UF I used to consciously think word by word, committing things to memory – word order, ‘concrete’ translations, etc. But now I can just scan a sentence, and if it’s something unfamiliar, I just think ‘harder’ for a second – hard to explain – I don’t think anything specifically, I just feel like I’m stamping the ‘pattern’ on my brain – and then the next time, nine times out of ten I’ll do it right, whatever it is. There are a lot of words in my brain now that don’t ‘carry’ translations with them in my thought process – like ‘overstappen’, for example, or ‘gezellig’, or ‘indrukwekkend’. There are mental images, impressions of exactly what they mean and how they should be used, but no English word jumps up and tags along with it. And I’m saying more and more stuff that I didn’t even have conscious knowledge of. Yesterday I was talking to the TV the way I always do during GTST, saying something about a character, and then I said, “Waar slaat dat nou op?” The next minute, I heard my own words, and I understood them, but I couldn’t have translated it into English if you paid me. The closest thing is probably ‘well, what sense does THAT make?’, but the point is it just fell out without me thinking about it and I had never said that before. And I have no idea where I learned it. That happens every once in a while, and it’s exciting. Is this just me, or does this point happen to everyone who learns a language?
Sorry, I’ll shut up now. It’s just exciting to be able to use myself as a test subject for language acquisition, seeing as I’m studying that very thing right now…
Anyway, other news. Saw P after all on Wednesday (actually Thursday, we met at Schiphol at 2 AM, haha). Got back to Utrecht early Thursday evening and did my usual eat-TV-computer-book thing… and today I got up at 7 to go to Doetinchem for W’s lesson. Oh yeah, and I found that book I wanted - Het veilige huis by Nicci French. I went into Bruma because I thought you could get stamps there. Didn’t see any stamps but did see that book, so I bought it. But I have GOT to figure out how to get that application to La Mancha, pronto. I’ll ask Yvon and Ted on Monday if I can fax it.
Not much else to tell. T and I have a ‘movie date’ Monday night, and then I have another lesson with W on Friday so I’ve got to scrape up some English reading material. And fast… the only English magazine I have here is Cosmopolitan hahaha… Oh wait! Oh oh oh… I just looked at my shelf of books and I have a GREAT idea!!! The UnDutchables!!! That would be a great thing to read from – it’s funny, casual, and interesting, and it’s about a subject he knows about. Go Jess! *pats self on back*
Going to heat up the last of my mac and cheese now…
stormed at 12:18
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