Quote:
Originally Posted by OctobersBlackRose
I decided early this morning (around 3:30am) to play around with a couple other courses on Duolingo, I added Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch. I couldn't even get past the first lesson with Swedish and Norwegian (easy languages for English speakers to learn my *****), but Dutch wasn't that hard, I flew through the first lesson. I think that had to do with me already learning German and seeing the similarities between the words presented. I should add Spanish just to see if I really do remember anything. I know I should stick to one language right now, but I was just curious about the other languages.
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So I've been trying to limit digressions about other languages, especially Dutch, since I thought you'd made it clear you weren't interested. But... it turns out, you are.
I just wanted to mention that I listened to a Dutch podcast on a whim, and it's pretty ridiculous how much I could understand with so little study. I'd probably estimate my efforts as about a lesson a month. And granted, I missed a lot, although there was also a lot of dialect and I don't count that
. And I don't listen to Dutch on the regular basis, so it took time just to get my brain into the groove of being able to recognize spoken words.
I think one defining characteristic of my approach to Dutch is laziness. It's really hard to make myself care about studying it systematically because every other word (if not more) - I look at, it's written exactly like in German, means the same thing, only is pronounced a little differently... I suppose it's kind of boring to study.
Although at the same time it makes me think what other languages I could get away with acquiring by only half-assing them. Like Italian. I've known that it's very similar to Spanish for a while. And yesterday I saw a video that instead compared it to French. And that's two languages which I've already studied quite in depth...
Anyway, if I ever get bored with Welsh, I have options.
Oh, yeah, Swedish and Norwegian - yes, technically they are Germanic, but they are actually in a separate branch from German, Dutch, and English - North Germanic (whereas English is West Germanic). They split off quite early on. I don't know exactly when, but certainly around the beginning of our era.
Old Norse was a separate phenomenon by the end of the first millenium. East Germanic went extinct around the middle... Yeah.
Anyway... The only problem with Dutch is that it can be harsh on the ears in fluent speech. It's a language that is unexpectedly fond of various "h" sounds, so a sentence to me often seems to be an unrelenting avalanche of hissing and gargling, out of which you'd be lucky to extract any meaninful vowels (or other sounds).