Week VII

[ReidSchluter]

During this week, I continued to master the perfect tense. As I said in my last post, there are a lot of verbs that become irregular in the past tense. In addition, many verbs also require the zijn 'to be' verb rather than the hebben 'to have' verb. This is very counter-intuitive as, for example, you must say 'Is (form of zijn) Pauline al thuisgekomen' to express the statement 'Has Pauline come home'. Also, I have continued to work with the modal auxiliary verbs such as 'to want to', 'to be able to', etc.... These verbs must appear with a separate infinitive verb in order to make sense, so it has required a concerted effort to fully understand their use.Also this week, I learned useful phrases for making/accepting apologies as well as what to say if you didn't understand someone. Both of these skills are obviously very helpful for everyday conversations. Things like 'Pardon' or 'Het spijt me dat...' are how you politely apologize, while you say 'Het geeft niet' or Het maakt niet uit' to accept an apology by saying 'It doesn't matter'. Meanwhile, 'Wat zeg je?' or "Wat betekent dat?' express 'What did you say?' & 'What does that mean?' respectively. Obviously, these conversational skills are vital to everyday life in a Dutch-speaking area.The next unit deals with pronouns, possessives, & demonstratives. These are all similar tools, and I will be working through them in the next week or two.