#dutch conjugation

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

nothing interesting here it's the exact same scene i just like seeing it

#french 13 isnt my favourite but i think she did a good job here. also in the gallery scene i liked that too #french yaz i love as much as english yaz #there IS smth interesting here btw but no one else will find it interesting but 'i know' is one of those #idk #like.........measuring things. for me. when im learning a new language #bc in english it's i know obvs and in french evidently it's 'i know' too - je sais #in dutch if you said 'i know' that'd be wrong #you have to say 'i know it'. or i suppose you could inverse it and do 'weet ik' and then you can leave out the 'it' but thats not the poin #so when im learning a new language im always like is it i know or is it i know it #and thats a stand in for lots of other similar questions of course #it's a never ending list of similar questions #but it's like the thing i remind myself of #so i dont go around saying 'ik weet' #i dont mind making like conjugation or grammar mistakes that much. thats like. it'll happen its whatever #but these kind of 'i can see how you got there but thats not how we say it' errors? hate it. dont want to make them #which is why i take forever to start writing/speaking bc yes i CAN make that sentence #but idk if thats how a french speaker would make that sentence so i'll wait until ive heard someone say 'je sais' #dont want to be speaking english/dutch with french words you know

[divorcetual]

east and southeast asian language conjugation I love you east and southeast asian language conjugation. Romance language conjugations I hate you.

#RAHHH ITS SO MUCH EASIER #learning spanish as an english speaker u get easier vocab to remember and grammer more similar to english #but in exchange you give up any hope of knowing all the verb conjugations #and its yhe opposite for Japanese #Indonesian is the best of both worlds #the dutch influence makes the grammer and vocab a lot more similar to english #AND its verb conjugations are easy #I love you indonesian mwah mwah ur my favorite language ever. All those other bitches can burn but not u I love u #SO SAD tho. bcs I cld never survive in SEA w/ the heat and humidity

[vogelmeister]

i love looking at shit you write when you're trying to learn a language because like,,, take this for example

B: Ja, ik kan bestel nu . Ik wil graag vis met de soep, en zal ik drink witte wijn? Nee, ik neem rode wijn. Misschien de Duitse wijn? Duitse wijn is de beste!

Ober: Zeker. Voor jou, ik zal even een lepel halen. Voor de soep. En zal jullie een voorgerecht ?

A: Nee. O! Heb je kaas met brood?

Ober: Ja. We hebben ook bitterballen. Het is ons nieuwe menu van Nederlands eten.

B: Bitterballen? Lekker.

A: Ik vind bitterballen lekker. Wat eet je liever, bitterballen of kaas met brood.

B: Ik eet graag bitterballen, altijd. Mag we een portie bitterballen?

Ober: Je vindt bitterballen en kaas lekker? Je moet deze kaasbitterballen een proeven. Ze zijn heerlijk!

like... you can tell homegirl is out here, trying to squeeze in every last morsel of dutch she learned. she is creating a story, but she also has written weird shit like "i bring you a spoon" and the whole "wat eet je liever" just to show that she knows that shit. good for her. come back soon.

#ALSO i know there are errors in this bc when i copy pasted this over i had to remove the comments from my dutch teacher #its mainly shit like me forgetting inversie conjugation and not logical shit so my point actually stands #so like i am well aware of the flaws here but im also here to show you what i wrote above all #actually idk what here in particular was not logical bc there was a bit after that was like unnatrual but thats not here is it #no #also this may be the homework where i actually sent in the wrong version sob sob cry cry ofc there were mistakes #i thought it was very funny of me to be like “you like cheese? you like bitterballen? try the FUCKING CHEESE BITTERBALLEN” #i found that hilarious at the time #hey im here to entertain #also i originally used the names of my ocs here lol but idk i just changed them to a and b here bc it doesnt matter

[complete-gay-chaos]

sometimes I wonder why conjugation is my greatest weakness while learning dutch (and when I learned french) and then I remember I never freaking do it properly in english either

#seriously and it's not because I don't KNOW 😭 #I KNOW WHAT THE CONJUGATIONS ARE #in dutch sure but also especially in english #but like 80% of the typos I make are conjugation errors #it's like it's in my blood

[poisonheartfrog]

For any of my fellow English speaking QSMP watchers looking to learn or brush up on their Spanish- I'm no expert, but I've done my time in middle and high school Spanish class, and I have a few website recs:

Word Reference: Spanish-English dictionary. Gives you information about multiple meanings of the word, as well as compound words and idioms. Also has a bunch of other languages (French, Italian, Catalan, German, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic)

SpanishDict: Another Spanish-English dictionary. I mainly use it for looking up verb conjugations, since IMO its charts are much easier to read than Word Reference's. It also had some other features that you have to make an account to use.

Conjuguemos: Conjugation practice games (with a frog mascot!). It tries to get you to make an account, but you don't have to- just click "use without account". You can sort by tense, mood, and regularity, and there's both straightforward practice and flashcards and more gimmicky games. Also has vocab and grammar practice, and a few other languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and Latin)

#qsmp #language learning #poisonheartposts

[catchyhuh]

Well part 6 made it obvious that besides French and Japanese Lupin can talk at least in English, Italian, Russian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Korean and Dutch (gosh, he's good, I'm jelly).

What languages do the others know? I have some headcanons about Goe, but I'm curious about your ones!

well, the short of it, for all of em really, is: “do i need to learn this language to continue living for the next month? yes? ok let’s learn some conjugation.” so it’s less about which specific languages and just HOW many they know so much as how do they go about the process of learning/how do they USE the language once they’ve learned it so. IT’S A LOT

and uh also they all tend to default to japanese but you probably knew that LET’S GET INTO THE LOT

jigen:

jigen knows the least out of all of them, mostly because he. does not talk to many people. he’s an unintentional perfectionist about it in just that one sense; if he’s communicating, he wants to be SURE he’s understood, no room for misunderstanding

of course, that doesn’t mean he’s a slouch. i’m sure he can still speak, listen to, read AND write at least ten more languages than you and i can, minimum. BUT STILL, he just doesn’t want any room for misinterpretation, none whatsoever. so usually, he lets someone else do the talking, or he attempts to get by with whatever he and the other party can understand. it’s kind of funny because his stubbornness with this means a lot of times the gang will purposefully leave him to flounder, because THAT’S WHAT HE GETS FOR NOT WANTING TO REMEMBER SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS “no ice in my drink please”

because of this, he’s most proficient in READING in other languages. there’s no need for input on his end, and he can get a hang of sentence structure AND the words themselves, so there’s no embarrassment later. so particular about these things

fujiko:

the only one who can speak a language better than she can understand it being spoken to her. like jigen, she mostly learns by just reading it, (sometimes by rereading a book she already knows, so she already has an easy guide to go off of) so trying to decipher someone TALK talking at a conversational speed is. a different beast

uses the whole multilingual thing as more of a novelty than a necessity. like it’s a party trick to her. like she's a translation dictionary in the flesh! ask her how to say purple in danish! wanna know the word for cookie in malay? if you want to know how to say “penis” in 30 languages, fujiko will frown and go “c’mon. grow up." ...but she'll still answer since it’s actually still just ‘penis’ in like five different languages anyway,

this is mostly because she weaponizes the “you don’t think i can understand x language, but yes, i can, and i can hear you calling me stupid while i’m standing right fucking next to you. you will regret this in time”

goemon:

absorbs foreign languages the fastest, which is hilarious because he’s always the most stubborn about wanting to just speak his first language. i mean it’s goemon, you probably saw this coming! 

has since softened on the concept, not because of a “loosening of his personal principles,” but rather, he saw how damn DIFFICULT it made things for the average person he interacts with for two seconds of his life. it was initially easy to hold onto it, until he saw the poor waitress grin apologetically and say she was so sorry she didn’t understand. then he softened. a BIT. if you know even a smidge of japanese he’s expecting it from you. 

wore a t-shirt that said COOL GUY in big, obnoxiously american letters once for a disguise. burnt it when the operation was over. lupin has five pictures of it. goemon allows the records to exist because he is, objectively, a COOL GUY

zenigata:

the funny thing is you’d ask him about it and he’d get kind of sheepish. like, yeah, he knows (he pauses to count on his fingers for a second) 23 languages but he’s not REALLY good at most of them it’s just like a thing for WORK it’s not like he’s REALLY got them down--

again, it’s the fault of that freakish hypercompetence that comes up for rule of funny. if he’s just getting off the plane and he realizes he’s left his gloves at home and is desperately trying to find a pair, no, he can’t get through in the slightest. but if it’s LUPIN involved, oh buddy if there is an ELEMENT of DANGER AND/OR LUPIN, he just breaks out entire sentences with almost perfect pronunciation and everything, to the point the other people in the room wonder if he was faking his issues earlier. and the answer is no, he wasn’t, he just didn’t have the proper motivation. NOW he does, and NOW he can speak fucking perfect indonesian, just because!

also kind of sort of treats it as a party trick the way lupin and fujiko do if he’s in a good enough mood (but you actually do get hints of that in the show, like that one little part 3 bit!) so that’s fun

#these people are insane. need to do a scientific study of how their brains work for real #lupin iii #lupin the third #jigen #fujiko #goemon #zenigata #asks

[maaarine]

English is not normal (John McWhorter, Aeon, Nov 13 2015)

“Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages.

But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.

German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. (…)

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such.

But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular.

I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that?

The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). (…)

The second thing that happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business.

This wave began in the ninth century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic offshoot, Old Norse.

But they didn’t impose their language. Instead, they married local women and switched to English.

However, they were adults and, as a rule, adults don’t pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies.

There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.

We can only imagine what kind of German most of us would speak if this was how we had to learn it, never seeing it written down, and with a great deal more on our plates (butchering animals, people and so on) than just working on our accents.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a language – the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much.

So the Scandinavians did pretty much what we would expect: they spoke bad Old English. (…)

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses.

What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield.

Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff. (…)

Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages.

After the Norse came the French. The Normans – descended from the same Vikings, as it happens – conquered England, ruled for several centuries and, before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words.

Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones developed a sense of English as a vehicle of sophisticated writing, and so it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone. (…)

One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin.

Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin and commence, or want and desire.

Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: we kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French).

Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking labourers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at table.

The different ways of referring to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today. (…)

Thus the story of English, from when it hit British shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming delightfully odd.

Much more has happened to it in that time than to any of its relatives, or to most languages on Earth.”

#article #science

[dedalvs]

hi! sorry if this has been answered elsewhere - but i was wondering what language(s) you drew on to create the sounds of the languages in shadow and bone, especially shu ?

I generally don't draw on languages to create a language: I just create them. In the case of all the Grishaverse languages, we were tied to what Leigh Bardugo had created in the books, and she absolutely cribbed for natural languages for them (Russian for Ravkan, German and Swedish for Fjerdan, Dutch for Kerch, Chinese for Shu…). We tried our best to undo that and make them original, while retaining all the words and grammar present in the books.

In the case of Shu, Jessie Sams did the lion's share of the work (we split last season, with me doing Zemeni and she doing Shu). For Shu, she created a head-initial grammar. Verbs have a number of conjugations, but no agreement, and the nouns have a fairly hefty case system. Honestly, I can't say what it's like. I don't think I've seen a language quite like it. And it certainly wasn't inspired by any one thing. Most head-initial languages have no cases, or a light case system. For this one, though, it makes sense, and it's pretty cool how it works. But I don't think she drew from anything other than the material in the books. In fact, the bulk of the serious portion of the grammar was created on a plane. lol I was working on Zemeni at the same time.

Now, the writing system for Shu was created by Christian Thalmann, and that definitely had a look that was supposed to evoke the brush stroke scripts of China, Japan, and Korea. This was partly dictated by the desires of the art department. He did a fantastic job with it—better than I could have done myself. That's why I hired him to do it. :)

#conlang #language #grishaverse #snb #shadow and bone #s&b #shadow & bone #zemeni #shu #shu han #novyi zem #ravkan

[kkulbeolyeonghwa]

Month Review!!

Korean

Total: 198

I wasn't planning to focus on Korean this much this much, but I guess immersion is doing its thing... I'll be showcasing my monthly favorite words I learned for every language as always, here are them in Korean!

主張 - 주장 - opinion 化石 - 화석 - fossil 同門 - 동문 - alumnus 甲富 - 갑부 - millionaire 비늘 - scales

Japanese

Total: 108

My secondary focus! I've improved a bunch this month!

きらびやか - dazzling 占い - うらない - fortune telling 合併 - がっぺい - merge 翌々 - よくよく - two...later 起点 - きてん - origin

Okinawan

First month of actual active study!

Total: 9

女子 - ゐなぐ - girl 起きっ - おきっ - to wake up

Mongolian

Total: 33

I was diving deep into conjugation, so that explains the lack of words... learned more conjugations this month!

энэтхэг - enetkheg - India зовлонг - zovlong - suffering дараалал - daraalal - order үндэс - ündes - root, foundation найз - najz - friend

French

Total: 53

Picked French up again... This is year 3 of French for me, after 2 years of no study. I haven't gotten rusty though! I think I've actually improved during my break! (Thanks EU for giving me constant French immersion)

connu - known lorsque - when net - clean, clear tandis - while tandis que - whereas

Mandarin

Total: ?

I didn't log my words in Mandarin this month but I did learn more than 10... I will need to focus on speaking a bunch!

Other languages:

I've been listening to a lot of foreign-language content! My friend group speaks a lot of Dutch, Hebrew and Thai, so a lot of unusual immersion :) I've also been learning more Cantonese from Youtube vlogs by accident!

#langblr #language #learning #studyblr #korean #한국어 #mongolian #монгол хэл #japanese #日本語 #中文 #mandarin #month #study log

[sudoscience]

Sometimes I question the usefulness of some of the sentences Duolingo teaches me (really, when am I ever going to have to say "You are an apple" or "She doesn't have a rhinoceros"?), but it did teach me an incredibly useful phrase the other day: ik ben moe en ik ga naar bed (I am tired and I am going to bed). So, thanks for that.

Look, I know it's more about teaching you the vocabulary and grammar than teaching you entire sentences through rote memorization, and I think that's fine, in principle. I just think they could do so in a more practical order. Why did it teach me how to say "De schildpad en het konijn lezen het menu" ("The turtle and the rabbit are reading the menu") like 20 units before it taught me how to say "Waar is de wc?" ("Where is the bathroom?")?

Furthermore, their Dutch instruction seems kind of lacking in general, especially compared to other languages like Spanish or French. It seems like it mostly expects you to intuit the grammar, or, confusingly, it will introduce a concept and then not explain it until much later. It introduces adjectives early in Section 1, but buries how they're conjugated in the details of Section 2. And, to make matters worse, Section 2 has 20 units that cover a wide variety of topics, but this is all the help they give you:

I could continue to rant, but... ik ben moe en ik ga naar bed.

#duolingo #nederlands #highly recommend supplementing duolingo with “bothering your mutual who's a native speaker”

[woahzpeltwrong]

WHAT I THINK OF YOU BASED ON YOUR DUOLINGO LANGUAGE OF CHOICE AS A PERSON WITH AN ALMOST 800 DAY LONG STREAK EXCEPT IT KIND OF DEVOLVES AND I MOSTLY COMPLAIN ABOUT DUOLINGO:

(I hope i did this cut right if not this is gonna be LLLOOONG)

Spanish: The classic. It's classic because it's the language that Duolingo is best at. It's actually half decent. You actually have a chance at learning Spanish! Besides that, you probably enjoy the memes about Duolingo, and I imagine your streak is decently long.

French: Everything I know about french Duolingo is bad. It's the only language that's picky about punctuation, it's often wrong for no reason, you probably are struggling. Also, can you conjugate a verb? Duolingo is generally bad with that. Besides that, everyone I know who does French duolingo is slightly pretentious and I don't think I trust you as a person.

German: Ohhhh boy. If you're attempting to learn German with Duolingo alone you might as well just buy the textbook already. While Duolingo is already not great, grammar is so rough for German on Duolingo. Please don't try to learn German grammar with Duolingo. Anyway I think if you're learning German in general you're pretty cool and that's no different for Duolingo learners. Best of luck to yall

Italian: I don't actually know much about Italian Duolingo. I do know that the two people I know that the two people that I know who do Italian Duolingo are gay though so Im assuming you're either Italian-American or gay.

Japanese: This used to be so, so much worse. They improved it, though. It's actually not horrible! Please do supplement your learning with something besides Duolingo, though. You will learn practically nothing otherwise. Anyway 99% chance you like anime because you're learning Japanese on Duolingo

Chinese: it could definitely be worse! It's definitely HORRIBLE, but it is usually actually right and its grammar isn't absolute trash like some of the other ones. It is definitely on the worse side for grammar, but it's not Latin. Aside from all of that, I do think there's at least a 25% chance you're doing this because you ARE Chinese, and a 75% chance you're doing this because you heard Mandarin was hard and wanted to see how true that was without putting money into it.

Russian: ME TOO!!!! This is my primary language on Duolingo currently and all I have to say is why? It's really not worth using Duolingo for, since I started in October 2022 and all I can say is that my potato is cold. It's primarily focused on vocabulary, but it's very random vocabulary, and you learn exactly none of the grammar at any point. I think you're cool :)

Korean: immediately stop. Please learn Korean somewhere else. It's not worth it. One of the worse ones, but at least it's not Latin Duolingo. If you actually actively do this you TERRIFY me and i am begging you to stop

Portuguese: uhhhh.... sure, i guess. It's not great, but it's... fine, I think. It's decent for vocabulary, if nothing. I have literally never met a Portuguese Duolingo learner though

Arabic: ALPHABET? YES. EVERYTHING ELSE? PLEASE NO. My opinion of you is the exact same as for Chinese, 75% chance you heard it was hard and didn't want to commit yet

Dutch: I genuinely did not know this was on Duolingo until I started doing this. Since it's not super popular I am also going to assume Duolingo does not care about it and it is probably only good for vocab. I do not think you are out there, I do not think people learn Dutch on Duolingo.

Swedish: as always please learn on something else its only good for vocabulary anyway you probably live in sweden, i think? Isnt it popular there or something??

Norwegian: general rule of thumb: vocabulary is the only thing duolingo is good at. Anyway, what? Learn somewhere else, anything below chinese on the list has been left to rot and they do not care about it

Turkish: wwwwow. You are really something! Learn Turkish somewhere else. At least it's not Latin

.....

At this point i became tired of saying "it's only good for vocabulary, learn grammar somewhere else." This can be assumed for literally everything.

.....

Polish: YOU SCARE ME POLISH DUOLINGO IS HARD

Irish: you are above the age of 45 and american

Greek: you are a mythology buff

Hebrew: you were probably curious. Everyone else learned somewhere else

Danish: im sorry that you're learning Danish. You are a sad person.

Hindi: The only person I know who is doing Hindi Duolingo is Indian herself, so I guess you're probably Indian idk

Czech: ...???????? Stop

Esperanto: generally i just hate Esperanto with such a burning passion that i don't think anyone should learn it

Ukranian: you're trying! I imagine you will give up in a week though, sorry!

Welsh: I'm all for protecting endangered languages but this isnt how to do it

Vietnamese: a language with six tones and they teach you how to pronounce 0 of them. You're probably cool but stop with duolingo

Hungarian: I did not know this was on duolingo! Very brave of you to try learning a Uralic language on Duolingo, is it going horribly?

Swahili: learn somewhere else. You are probably so cool but duolingo and SWAHILI??????????

Romanian: The only person ive ever met who did this gave up in 3 days because duolingo sucks. I am assuming your streak is no longer than a week

Indonesian: ..... okay. Sure. At least its not Latin.... I think you started learning this completely for fun though

Hawaiian: I HATE DUOLINGO FOR THIS!!!! IT IS A CRITICALLY ENDANGERED LANGUAGE IT DESERVES SO MUCH BETTER!!!!!!!! I LOVE YOU FOR LEARNING IT BUTHFJCNEIFBDJFJDSJD!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE YOU DUOLINGO

Navajo: see above. Love you. Hate duolingo.

Klingon and High Valyrian: i hate you

Latin: HERE IT IS. MY WORST ENEMY. GOD I HATE LATIN DUOLINGO. THE AUDIO QUALITY WAS CLEARLY RECORDED IN A CAR. ITS NOT EVEN GOOD FOR VOCABULARY BECAUSE IT IS LITERALLY WRONG VERY VERY OFTEN. ITS SUPER PICKY ON WORD ORDER AND FOR WHAT? ITS LATIN!!! ITS NOT PICKY!!!! IVE BEEN LEARNING LATIN IN A FORMAL SETTING FOR 3 YEARS NOW AND I HATE LATIN DUOLINGO MORE THAN ANYTHING. IF YOU WANT TO LEARN LATIN BUY A LATIN ENGLISH DICTIONARY. IF YOU WANT GRAMMAR GO ONTO MAGISTRULA. ITS A GREAT WEBSITE FOR LATIN GRAMMAR. OH, BUT WHAT ISNT GREAT? DUOLINGO. IN LATIN, TO ANNOY IS TRANSLATED AS "vexare". THIS IS. ACCORDING TO DUOLINGO, "to come from". WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT??? I HATE DUOLINGO. I HATE THIS. ITS ALWAYS WRONG. THE AUDIO QUALITY IS ACTUALLY GARBAGE. I HATE DUOLINGO I HATE DUOLINGO I HATE DUOLINGO. DO NOT LEARN LATIN ON DUOLINGO!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE DUOLINGO SO MUCH I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT DONT USE LATIN DUOLINGO YOU ARE BEING LIED TO

Scottish Gaelic: you are again over 45 and American

Finnish: ohhhh god. I am so sorry. Ur cool ig but im sorry

Yiddish: i am, again, so sorry. Its duolingo. You can't write IN YIDDISH in duolingo because of course you cant

Haitian Creole and Zulu: I don't believe you these are the bottom two languages

#duolingo #language learning #language

[murdercore-powerfuneral]

Hello native English speaker: here are the three easiest languages you can learn:

Bastardized Dutch

Actual Dutch

Fucking Swedish

If you're looking for a language that would be useful try one with 5 billion ways to conjugate a verb

[lenguagesforaina]

Fall/winter lenguage goals

So I'm starting school again in less than a month, and with my re introduction to a rutine and the academic world, i want to set myself a more consistent scheduale for my lenguage learning, since i dont feel like im improving that much right now. I'm starting by setting a list in each one of my tl that i will try to achive in the upcoming 4 months before christmas.

DUTCH:

(I'm lower intermidate, been studiying it for a yean now)

Take 6 italki lessons

Keep a consistent daily diary

This I've already been doing and its working wanders, so I'm keeping it up and trying to writte at least a page a day every single day.

Find a lenguage exchange partner

(If you speak dutch and want to learn some spanish or catalan hit me up!)

Read 2 books

I have 2 books in dutch witch are for children but quite above my level rn, one about orangutans and one about witchcraft.

Go trough 4 magazines

I use magazines (children's ones, about animals and with lots of comics and games) to practice intensive reading, so i go trough them very slowly and paying attention to every single word.

Watch 25 hours of movies/tv in dutch (minimum)

Right now i'm watching My little pony , Tangled the series, and i want to start Wie is de mol

Watch dutch youtube in class

I study art and most of my classes will be studio time, so i'll try to chose youtube videos to have as background noise instead of music whenever i can use my headphones.

Master the 10.000 most common words

I'm planning on using Clozemaster for that, but i still need to get the premium version. Also my flashcard app of choice: Duocards. And compleating a vocabulary list notebook i bought recentley.

Learn to conjugate like a pro

I'll probablly be investing on buying a grammar book, but even if i can't get to that, i want to focus on learning conjugation well with videos or websites, more than eny other grammar point at this moment.

FRENCH:

(Used to be advanced but lost a lot of it, so im revivifying it step by step)

Master the 5.000 most common words

Sadly i've forgotten a lot of vocab so i want to start from the bottom again to solidify the basics in my brain

Get a grammar book and start it

If i can find it i want to dig up my old high school grammar book or find a simalar one secind hand.

Watch 6 movies in french

They'll probablly be Gibli films, since i find french really armonizes with the Gibli aesthetic.

Start reading a bit every day with apps

There are apps that show you a bit of art history, fun facts, or a history event that happened on that day every morning. You can set those in your tl and then you have a bit of reading every day provided to you in a subject you like!

Writte 1 or 2 short stories/texts every month

I dont want to writte as much as in dutch but i still want to practice my spelling, so ill be filling in 1 or 2 pages every other week with watever i feel like writting about.

Listen to more music in french and start analyzing song lyrics at least 1nce a week

Music is my main motivation to learn french so i'm gonna dive into it as much as possible

INDONESIAN:

(-0 beginner, haven't started yet)

Learn the 150 most common words

The basics: greetings,colors, animals, 10 common verbs, etc...

Get to the 1st checkpoint on Duolingo

Learn to introduce myself

Learn the basics of the grammar and save up for a grammar book

I'll probablly gift myself an indonesian textbook by christmas. Until then ill watch a lot of videos to famirialize myself with the grammar points.

Start a childrens tv show in indonesian

Also music! Instead of doing a lot hardcore studying i'll be just doing a lot of pasive learning and listening a lot

#lenguageleraning #lingblr #dark academia #learn dutch #travel #lenguages #studyblr #study blog #polyglot #dutch #indonesian #french #learn french

[might-as-well-happen]

I want to talk about how language and dialect is written in Stoker’s Dracula. I know some people have already written about this, with much more insight that I could have, but as someone who’s not a native speaker, and specifically Dutch, I want to focus more on Van Helsing’s language. (Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot of German, so my arguments about German may be wrong - feel free to correct me if so!)

You see, he is described as a Dutch man, and it is clear in his sentence structure and tense usage, that he’s not a native English speaker - or specifically British. But, the sentence structure and verb tenses he uses are not reminiscent of the Dutch language structure or verb tense usage either. It’s not even reminiscent of German (which is the language that Van Helsing speaks - not Dutch and yes I’m still mad about it. Dutch and German are not the same, y’all!)

So, I wonder then what have Stoker the idea to make Van Helsing Dutch German, but have him use this different, I want to say “generic” Non-English sentence structure.

In the passage from September 22nd, Van Helsing doesn’t the verbs, and he uses ‘he’ in places where it does not make sense to do so. In Dutch you would have conjugated the verbs, so why would Van Helsing with 7 PHD’s not know to conjugate the verbs in English - even after a breakdown? Why would Van Helsing say “the laugh he come just the same” when it would’ve been more logical (for a Dutch or German speaking person) to have said “the laughing comes still/even so/anyway” since in Dutch one would probably say “het lachen komt toch/alsnog”. Also, the rest of the sentence (which I hadn’t marked in blue) does not make sense if Stoker wanted to show that Van Helsing was not an incredible English speaker, because “But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry” doesn’t feel Dutch either - it would’ve been more like “But think not (any)more that I am all sorry if I cry” as to be translated from the Dutch “maar denk niet meer dat ik zielig ben als ik huil”. As to regards of the “laugh he come” I don’t even know. It’s not Dutch at all, and I could see it being German, with the Der (masculine the) and er meaning him - it still doesn’t make sense, since Der is not er, and Der would not have been used in that spot in the sentence.

[image ID: a passage from September 22nd with some parts highlighted in a light blue (which in this ID will be bolded) reading:

"Ah, you don't comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.' Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave—laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say 'Thud! thud!' to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy—that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man—not even to you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son—yet even at such moment King Laugh he come to me and /End ID]

Furthermore, on September 25th there are some peculiar things to note in Van Helsing’s language. Throughout the book (or emails haha) he uses articles consistently (as far as I noticed), but here he suddenly doesn’t when he says “I came to see that was friend” which reads weird to me, since the Dutch use articles and especially Germans use articles. It would have been more logical to have said “I came to see she who was the friend” since that is how you would’ve said it in both Dutch and German. Furthermore, when later on he says “In great perplexity then I come to you, and ask you out of your so much kindness…” it doesn’t make sense either - in Dutch at least. If one had gone for complete Dutch sentence structure it would have been “come I then to you” and if one had gone for something that was a bit more like English it would be “I then come to you”. As with the “out of your so much kindness”, I don’t even know what Stoker was doing here, since it should have been “ask you from/of the good/kindness of your heart” since that’s also a saying in Dutch. I don’t know if it makes sense in German tho, but Dutch people wouldn’t have said it that way.

[Image ID: a passage from September 25th with some parts highlighted in a light blue (which in this ID will be bolded) reading:

"It is Mina Murray that I came to see that was friend of that poor dear child Lucy Westenra. Madam Mina, it is on account of the dead I come."

"Sir," I said, "you could have no better claim on me than that you were a friend and helper of Lucy Westenra." And I held out my hand. He took it and said tenderly:—

"Oh, Madam Mina, I knew that the friend of that poor lily girl must be good, but I had yet to learn——" He finished his speech with a courtly bow. I asked him what it was that he wanted to see me about, so he at once began:—

"I have read your letters to Miss Lucy. Forgive me, but I had to begin to inquire somewhere, and there was none to ask. I know that you were with her at Whitby. She sometimes kept a diary—you need not look surprised, Madam Mina; it was begun after you had left, and was in imitation of you—and in that diary she traces by inference certain things to a sleep-walking in which she puts down that you saved her. In great perplexity then I come to you, and ask you out of your so much kindness to tell me all of it that you can remember."

"I can tell you, I think, Dr. Van Helsing, all about it." /End ID]

Anyway, all that to say that I think it’s weird Bram Stoker made Van Helsing Dutch (but actually German - he literally said “Mein Gott!” which is German) and then made his language usage to be Different from “proper” English to signify that; and then he even messed up on making it sound sufficiently German or Dutch! The thing that made it stand out to me though is that he doesn’t give Van Helsing a ‘visible’ accent or dialect, like he does with the people from Whitby or the zookeeper, etc. He doesn’t write Van Helsing saying things “laik zis” or “wiz a vizibel egzent” (if German) or “laik tis” “wit an vissebowl exent” (if Dutch) or however you would write accents like that. I have seen some other people on here mention that it’s probably classism and intellectualism, which I would agree with - Van Helsing is smart, these fishermen and townsfolk and Romani people are not, and Stoker visualizes that through the writing of accent and dialect.

I don’t know why Stoker made this choice to have Van Helsing be Dutch/German and have him speak in English that’s not based on Dutch or German grammar when he says things sometimes - especially when emotional, it seems. He might just not have done any research, but still. If anyone has more thoughts on this, I’d love to discuss it with y’all!

I don’t really remember where I was going with this, it was just something that I noticed and wanted to point out I guess, but it may not make a whole lot sense, idk. Also! I’ve said it before but my German is not good, and maybe it does all make sense when Van Helsing is actually German. I don’t personally think so, but Germans feel free to correct me!

#dracula daily #dracula #bram stoker #dracula meta #van helsing #language