Week IV (Delayed)

[ReidSchluter]

This post is delayed by 3 days, but I will just write as though I did it mid-week. In terms of the two artifacts that I would like to be evaluated upon, I think that a one-page or so autobiography would be a good additional item to the Dutch EU proficiency exam (which I need to know how to retrieve). I was also considering maybe recording a conversation between Jan & myself, but I think it may be too soon for me to do unscripted. I think that writing about myself, and simply displaying the vocabulary, grammar, etc... that I have learned would provide a more fair assessment of my progress at this point. I would turn that in first, and then take the Dutch proficiency test the next day. I am not entirely sure what it is (and again I need to know how to acquire it), but I would imagine/hope that I do reasonably well for someone at the beginner level.I accomplished all of my specific goals for this week that I outlined in my previous learning plan. During my lengthy car-ride to & back from Florida I was able to get through: specifics of the royalty, yes/no questions, rhetorical questions, months/dates/holidays, & both congratulatory & telephone conversation phrases. I was also able to read a couple of magazines (one sort of a political commentary i.e. Newsweek & the other about soccer), and discern many of the main points from the articles--particularly the soccer ones. This upcoming week, I have been/will continue to work on the perfect tense (I have...), which my book devotes a lot of pages to, and Jan agrees is very important. In addition, we both agreed that it would be a good idea to work through the verb list in the back of my book and identify & remember the important ones on my own. I will learn their meanings & their stems, which will be very useful to learn in tandem with the perfect tense--which connotes much of completed action dialogue according to Jan. Hopefully learning a lot of the fundamental verbs will allow me to have better general understanding, as well as helping me write a mini-autobiography.Aside from that, my pronunciation is developing well. My voice thankfully recovered from bronchitis, and I can again make the important g/ch sound. I typically now only have a couple errors in the sample dialogues that I do with Jan. My speech is still somewhat slow, but presumably speed will continue to develop with time. I would imagine that at the end of the semester I will be able to record an unscripted dialogue with Jan as a final artifact.