I've made it into level 3 "Nederlands voor anderstaligen"! These courses are so intensive it has pretty much become my whole day. Once again, in the new class we have an interesting mix of people. One of the first exercises in the class was to go around and interview each other to see if more than one student came from the same country. We have people from Canada, Thailand, China, Portugal, Australia, Kenya, Romania, Poland, India, and Peru. Once again, I'm the only American. As for pairs, two from Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and Iran. There is one girl from Kosovo, and one from Serbia, one of whom feels that they are from the same country, the other of whom immediately disagreed. At that point the teacher quickly changed the subject!
The class it taught completely in Dutch now. Our teacher is great, she enunciates really well, and doesn't speak too fast. She also has a very expressive face, and occasionally makes gestures so I understand her really well. Which is good, because there is a lot to learn! So far we know how to introduce ourselves and give basic information about ourselves. Theoretically we can make basic comparisons, speak in the perfect and imperfect past tense, talk about our likes and dislikes, order food and drinks, reserve a hotel room, go to the doctor, conduct our banking, ask for and give directions, and understand a little bit of museum tour. In real life sometimes people ask me to repeat myself when I order a cup of coffee, so who knows.
We haven't yet covered the future tenses, which sometimes makes conversing with Travis at home a little challenging, but I have enough trouble remembering the word order, proper grammar and conjugations as it is, so I'm not in too much of a hurry. Every day I sit in class from 9am to noon, then go home, sometimes stopping to do grocery shopping on the way. I usually give myself a break over lunch, and then spend the rest of the afternoon doing my homework. I also try to look up the words in the next days' lesson that I don't already know, so I can pay attention in class, instead of frantically leafing through my dictionary. Then I make dinner, Travis gets home and I spend the rest of the evening trying to teach him what we learned that day, hounding him to say things to me in Dutch, and generally making a complete pest of myself. I'm also working on reading a Dutch comic book series, and I try to read a few newspaper articles a day, too. There are so many words that I don't know yet, so it's hard to say how much progress I'm really making. I know I've reached at least a small milestone now, though, because when I heard people speaking Netherlands Dutch instead of Belgian Dutch they sound really funny to me now!
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