Steve's Wanderings ...

Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Sounds of Dutch …

For the past few weeks I have enjoyed learning bits and pieces of Dutch - especially since Belle has encouraged me by writing to me in both Dutch and English - and she has been very patient and tolerant of my frequent mistakes!  Buying a Dutch-English dictionary has helped me immensely since now I am free to try to construct sentences and phrases on my own instead of relying on the Google translator to do it - often with hilarious results!

However, there is one thing I realize now that is missing - hearing the pronunciation of Dutch.  When I write in German I can “hear” what I’m writing as I go.  Of course the same is true with English.  But with Dutch at the moment I cannot do that - I have SOME idea of how things should sound but often its an educated guess - and that in the end isn’t really good enough ... (at least for me ...).  Even with my Chinese lessons I have opportunities to tie words and sounds/pronunciation together.

So ... I will work on remedying this.  I need to hear the sounds of Dutch so I can read most any word and know how it should be pronounced.  I also need to learn basic grammar, but knowing German grammar I believe will be a great help since there are similarities between the two.  I have some audio CD’s which I will listen to, and I will look for a Dutch tutor if possible (not forgetting my Chinese of course, which is important!).  With those possibilities I think this will make the Dutch language come alive for me ...


A nice website which I plan to use ... - http://www.dutchgrammar.com/