Happy Queen's Day!

Language Fun

Learning a new language, especially one which shares so much with German and a bit of French (with a lot of English) has me excited again about all the languages in my repertoire.

German is my "mother tongue" but thanks to moving to the US at age 5, and having my entire education in American school systems, English comes much easier to me.

French I took throughout high school and a little bit in college. (I also took Spanish in middle school but can only remember "hola" and how to count to ten. There was also sign language in elementary school but I've only retained the ABC's and a few verses of Bette Midler's "From A Distance"...don't ask)

These days I find myself excited to improve and refresh both French & German while becoming (hopefully) fluent in Dutch. Dutch level one is coming to an end at the end of next month and if I pass the exam I immediately start level two.

To regain my comfort with German I've been following German news feeds through google-reader and occasionally watch our one German TV channel. My mom gave me a German book for Christmas which I've been reading and I requested German speaking friends and family to send me a list of their favorite German reads.

Even better of an exercise have been the translations I've been working on for my grandfather. He wants me to translate his memoirs from German to English for our relatives in the US, and he wants me to do it quickly as he feels it's "his time"... which sort of reminds me of a story of a girl who would make up stories for her grandmother, the "to be continued" type, so old granny would hang on another day. It worked for her so I think I'll take my time too.

For French I'd need a bigger refresher. Another "partner" here is not only French but a French language teacher and is excited to help me brush up. I haven't taken her up on it yet but she does speak to me in French whenever she sees me (I mostly respond in English).

What is really cool are the cinemas here in Rotterdam. Thanks to discount cards I go all the time and last week I tested out two foreign language films to see how I'd do.

The first was Coco & Igor; a French film about the affair between legends Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. I understood bits of French and was helped along by the Dutch subtitles which I mostly understood as well. Stravinsky was Russian, so there were also a lot of Russian bits. Dutch subtitles were most useful here but I understood one word (other than thank you) which was used a few times...krasivaya.

Krasivaya (beautiful) I can recognize thanks to the partners' meet ups I'm constantly going to. The "partners" are the other wives, girlfriends and fiancees of the students in the MBA program. A few have kids and in spending so much time with them we are all picking up a few words in each language. The other day my Chinese born & raised/German married friend picked up a pink baby bottle and waving it called out to our little Israeli girl (who was looking for it) "MAH-yim!". The girls mother was making salad in the next room. My Chinese friend realized what she was doing, laughed and remarked how cool it was that we are all able to communicate to the children in their native tongue so it was okay for mom not to be around. ("MAH-yim"means water in Hebrew.) And so I've been picking up a bit of Russian, Hebrew and Mandarin (although less Mandarin as I speak German to our little half-German half-Chinese guy). I have the opportunity to pick up some Hindi but don't see our little Indian friend as often.

The second film was a Dutch movie. I knew it wouldn't be a great film but I thought it would be a good first Dutch movie. It took place in South America, so I knew there'd be a lot of Spanish speaking, which meant there'd be Dutch subtitles. Dutch reading comes very easy to me, it's the listening I am having a hard time with. All in all it went pretty well, although as predicted, during Dutch spoken scenes I still had a bit of trouble distinguishing words but generally I got the point and feel ready to start going to Dutch language films more often.

Now accepting: visitors!

The NY Times had an article this week about travel to Europe getting cheaper thanks to the dollar gaining strength.

We have a friend visiting us in June and another who is looking into late summer/early fall.

Think about it and let us know!


*Image credit: Thomas Fuchs, The New York Times Company