Twists and turns

Benny, over at "Fluent in 3 months", writes that the most important thing you can do to learn a new language is to just plunge in and do it. Start speaking right away, don't worry too much about grammar, just start talking and reading and writing and after about 3 months, you should just "get it".

It works to a certain point, for Dutch. I find that, for most of my daily life's needs, my fledgling Dutch--by which I mean most things are in the right order most of the time, and that I can understand most of what most people say to me in return--is enough. I have, after all, made dentist appointments and changed insurance policies and started a business with nary a word of English. But what they say of the NT2, which I will be taking later this year (unless I don't have to, by dint of Karel and I getting married), is downright terrifying. It is terrifying for two reasons: first, it is a four-hour test spread out over two days, with separate reading, writing, listening, and speaking sections (one hour each). They really do test your comprehension: they'll write something one way in the reading section, and put the answer in another way. Ditto for listening. Secondly, they are real sticklers for grammar. This means, all your "er" need to go in the right places with the correct prepositions (actually, picking out the correct prepositions is harder than figuring out where to put "er"), verbs must be conjugated in the correct tense, with clear pronunciation of the "e" at the end of the imperfect, etc. Happily, they do not penalize for "de" and "het" mix-ups.

Like most languages spoken by a limited number of people, Dutch is a highly contextual one, where everybody knows that "bakken" means "to fry" unless it means "to bake". and "weer" means "again" until it means "the weather". The rules in Dutch are many, the exceptions are even greater. But the main reason I tend to disagree with most of what Benny has to say about taking lessons (for Dutch, at least) is that at more advanced levels, you can't really suss out the rules on your own. They aren't self-explanatory, and they certainly aren't obvious. And the sheer number of "Dutch-isms" are enough to boggle even the most dedicated immersion-type learner.

But that being said, Dutch is like any other language, in the sense that, if you worry too much about the grammar, you won't get anywhere. At some point, you just have to turn off your self-consciousness and your inner grammar marm and just start blurting things out, and trust that you'll be able to make yourself understood.

Klingon and Elvish

I think I've finally cracked the code to learning stuff--any sort of stuff:

Instant feedback.

Then again, I guess that shouldn't surprise me: it's why I upgraded from film to digital, it's why I love my job (experiments either work or they don't--either way, you have an answer), and it's why I love the Code Academy.

Coding, after all, isn't all that different from learning a language: it's taking the information you want to convey, and turning it into information that someone (or something, as the case may be) else can understand. There are rules, and then there are ways around those rules. The only real difference, in the end, is that unless you're a hard-core coding freak, you get to interact with people with the one, and machines with the other.

I also think that this is why my Dutch lessons at the Radboud have been such a miserable and utter fail, and why going to them is such a chore, rather than a great way to get to know people. The lessons that I had in Maastricht, for all of their shortcomings and inability to handle different learning styles, at least had the benefit of not being so structured, and being able to exercise your newly-learned Dutch right away. Or maybe I just lucked out with my teachers there. But regardless: even though we covered less grammar in Maastricht, I still feel as if I left Maastricht able to speak much better Dutch than I currently do. I suppose it also helped that, in Maastricht, the students were better than the ones in my current class.

It's sort of like clicker-training, really, except without the treat. And the feedback doesn't always have to be positive. But it does have to be relatively quick to follow the event, otherwise you lose the limbic connection and the memory you build doesn't last.

Hey, I never said I wasn't a geek...