Dutch was very frustrating to me. I wanted to know about the culture, what books they read as children, so I did research. I found out Jip en Janneke, the most known children books. But for some reason I thought that was too easy for me. I wanted to read novels. I was wrong.
People may ask why even learn Dutch? I'd say I've lived in Belgium for 5 years. I have some Dutch friends and I'd like to be able to communicate with them in their native language. That was really motivating at some particular missions when I had a lot of Dutch colleagues. Hearing it so much, I started to like the sound of it.
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Still, I had this surge of motivation and told myself I'm going to be fluent in Dutch in 6 months. Since I know French and English, I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. It's not that easy. At least not for me. I read a lot about learning languages and recently one old book came to my attention. Kato Lomb's How I Learn Languages.
This was a great discovery for me. All these modern methods can be overwhelming, so many different things to do. Kato's method is simpler: just read a lot.
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So I tried to implement it with Japanese first. It worked well. I read graded readers, fairly easy ones, level 0 & level 1. Easy, but I learned a lot.
It didn't go so well with Dutch. I went straight to novels. And I think that was a mistake. I didn't have the level to understand novels. I skipped the basics: alphabet, pronunciation, basic grammar, basic vocabulary. I thought it was a shortcut, but before you can run you have to crawl.
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You can't use context to guess if you have no context to begin with.
The method is simple but not easy to implement. You need a foothold, a base to start with. You need "just enough" vocabulary and grammar to understand the text. Then you read, repetition is the key. Reading gives you far more exposure than listening to a video or a native speaker.
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But what's "just enough"? Frankly I don't know, I'll have to experiment and adapt. For Japanese it was learning hiragana & katakana and just a little bit of kanji. I'll replicate that in Dutch.
I guess I was complacent because I kept hearing "you know English, it should be easy." Sure, a lot of words look like English but they're not pronounced the same, and the meaning isn't always what you'd expect. Anyway, I'll go back to the basics and I'll let you know how it goes.
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Don't forget, it has to be fun. The first time I actually enjoyed learning English was through NBA 2K11, when I was 14. I wasn't studying. I just wanted to know what the casters were saying.
Whether it's a graded reader, a children's book, or a video game, the key is doing something you genuinely care about.
That's the method.
What's yours? Reply and let me know.
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À bientôt, tot ziens, またね
