Hello everyone, I am still here!  It has been a while since I wrote a Dutch post, or any post for that matter.  It has been a really busy year for us and I will share more with you all soon.

I wish I could say I am a lot further than I am, but if I am honest I am using every excuse possible to why I am not where I wanted to be by now.  Work is my main excuse but I know that it is my fault and I should spend my free time more productively.

Last year I did manage to complete 2 Dutch courses, and can say I have officially passed A1 and A2 level.  This means total I now (should) know around 1500+ words.  I do notice that I understand some conversations around me but when it comes to responding, I can only reply with ja or nee or very limited short sentences.

I still I haven’t found my way of learning yet as I am still jumping from book to book, and different websites or apps.  But I am not ready to let the language defeat me, so I am going to give another 110% and dive right back into learning.

I have recently finished a free online introduction Dutch course at Groningen University. It was starting back at the beginning but it was be a good refresher course to get me back into the language. Going forward I need to ensure that I make time to learn as this is the key to learning something new.  The course lasted only 3 weeks, and requests you to study for 3 hours per week.

The topics that I learnt on the course was;

• Reading and listening to dialogues about work, study, hobbies, eating, drinking, living, weather and the time
• Understanding the grammar around the conjugation of verbs, word order,personal pronouns, adjectives, modal verbs and making questions
• Writing and speaking assignments including introducing oneself and speaking about eating and living
• Introduction to Dutch culture

For people who do not have much knowledge of Dutch this course, this is a great starting introduction.  For me, the course was probably a little too easy but I still enjoyed it.  My main challenge I face learning Dutch is the sentence structure, and thankfully in the course the teacher helped by clearly explaining all the different structures for forming sentences. It will still take a lot practise and even more mistakes but I think I might now be on the right path.

This course has given me the kick start back into learning.  If you would like to join the free course you will find the link below.

www.futurelearn.com

Do you face any challenge when learning something new?  If you have any tips on learning a new language I would love to hear them.

N x