Friday, August 13, 2004

Eight Days of Dutch

Today we supposedly learned two grammatical things that happen in Dutch and many other languages, that don't happen in English. I finally feel like we've entered territory where I'm going to start feeling a little challenge. One is reflexive verbs (like, I remember myself to call my mother) and the other is seperable verbs where the conjugated part is one place and the little preposition part of the word is found someplace else. There must be explainable rules to this. And if there's rules, I can learn them.

The two people who spoke today were Marina from Russia and Jul from Lyon, France. Both were interesting. Makes me wonder if I shoud have talked about Texas or New York. Jul went first and talked about the region of France where he's from. It's very interesting, all of the talking about these cities and countries. I just assumed people knew about New York City or America. Most don't. One more way that I, like most Amercans, assume too much. Unfortunately, I had already seen Jul's little presentation in our small group. I couldn't think of anything else to ask. He's already taken all my questions from the first time around and woven them into his little presentation. So no quesiton from Mr. Questionman.

Marin talked about Moskow. She is young looking, I'm guessing late 20's, two kids, married to a Dutch guy. They live in Moskow, but will be moving to the Netherlands next year. She's very proud of Moskow and she had a very good accent. She's one where she tries to chat in Dutch during the breaks. She uses a lot of Dutch even when she's speaking English. She's got a very sterotypical Russian accent.

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