Monday, 24 June 2013

Embarking on a language learning adventure!

Although, technically, my gap year has already begun, in my mind it doesn’t start until the beginning of August when I’m off to Castlefest in the Netherlands with my mother and one of my best friends, Aimee.

However, there are a fair few weeks before that and, in my normal style, I have decided to be productive and have decided to use my up and coming trip as an excuse to do something that I have wanted to do for a while now. This leads us nicely to the question:

“How much Dutch do we think I can learn in one month? Do we think that aiming for fluency is a bit optimistic?!”

I posted this question on facebook this morning (the second question being a joke, before anyone mentions it) and had some lovely replies from people which is quite nice. They wouldn’t have stopped me anyway!

However, it’s a long time since I’ve started learning a language from scratch and it’s a funny place to be. French took me ten years of lessons to be anything like competent, Japanese took three months until I could converse in it, German happened by accident, and lets ignore Hungarian for now, shall we? The bonus with Dutch is that I find I can understand a fair amount because of the similarities to German and to English but it’s still a daunting task.


But if you know me at all you will know that daunting tasks are my favourite!

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