Week IX

[ReidSchluter]

This week I finished the unit on pronouns & possessives. I had already worked with personal pronouns & possessives last week, and this week I went through demonstratives & independent possessives.Demonstratives are fairly difficult because using them properly requires that you also know the gender of the corresponding noun. If the noun is common gender or plural, the word for 'that/those' is 'die', whereas if it is neuter gender or something you are pointing towards (advice courtesy of Jan) it is 'dat'. Only 15% of nouns in Dutch are neuter gender and there is no definitive pattern, so applying demonstratives requires that you memorize noun gender on a case-by case basis. The same rule applies for 'this/these', which is 'deze' for common gender & plural, whereas it is 'dit' for neuter gender or something in the room. Therefore, 'this house' would be 'dit huis', whereas 'those books' is 'die boeken'.Meanwhile, independent possessives require you to add a 'van' (of, from) in front of a normal possessive (i.e. mij, jou. etc..) to indicate possession. Therefore if pointing at something, you would say 'dit is van mij'. Saying 'Hoe groot is dat van jou?' means 'How big is yours?'. Independent possessives are the appropriate means to say simple statements like 'this is mine' or 'that is yours', and are therefore very useful to know.Over the course of the next week, I'm going to try to learn some useful adjectives that Jan will give to me tomorrow. The next unit in the book addresses ending an '-e' ending to adjectives whether they occur before or after the noun--& the resultant spelling changes that follow the same patterns as when you conjugate verbs. It will be useful to focus on adjectives heavily, as they have yet to be directly addressed in the book. There are also small sections on the use of apostrophe's in Dutch as well as family vocabulary (i.e. mother, father, etc...), which will obviously be very useful to know.