Week XII

[ReidSchluter]

This week I only studies one section of the book, albeit an important one. Instead, I spent a lot of time looking at the internet resources that Jan gave me in order to gauge how my understanding of Dutch has developed.The section of the book that I looked at was perhaps the most important I have read to date. It explained that Dutch was a TMP language meaning that modifiers in any sentence are always ordered by time, manner, place. This is incredibly useful knowledge because English is the opposite as a PMT language, and to this point I had always been confused by the word ordering in Dutch. I don't know why the book waited so long to elaborate on such a fundamental rule, but it is certainly helpful knowledge that will help me a lot.Since I've learned many of the fundamentals of Dutch including the basic verb tenses, all the major word groups including vocabulary, pronouns, interrogatives, possessives, etc..., I asked Jan for some Dutch-language websites that would help me reinforce & contextualize these skills. I already look at the main--sort of tabloidish--newspaper a lot, but he gave me some other helpful resources.Geenstijl.nl is a useful popular news website that is sort of similar to drudgereport.com in the United States. It explains popular news in relatively everyday linguistic terms.Spitsnieuws.nl is another, slightly more formal, news source that uses more functional dialogue than de Telegraaf.He also gave me two other websites jeugdjournaal.nl & hetklokhuis.nl (which I already had), which are for early-teenaged kids. These sources possess a lot of reading and listening material that outline things in a simpler & more easy to understand fashion.All of these sources together are very helpful. They will allow me to keep interacting with the Dutch language on a daily business once this semester is done, and I'm no longer around Jan. Reading the blogs & comments on the sites is very helpful too, as I can read colloquial/conversational Dutch.