The curfews set up by the government due to COVID-19 brought a big change into my family’s life. All the usual routines we had were disrupted, which resulted in me not knowing what to do for some time. This was also partly due to the IB exams being cancelled and therefore no pressure from school, which was also an unusual feeling. However, I started doing several things to keep me busy apart from schoolwork that still had to be done for the distant learning program for some subjects. I spent much more time doing art, working out and talking with classmates and friends from South Africa, as well as spending more time with my family and helping out around the house. One of my classmates will, like me, study in the Netherlands and she sent me a link to online Dutch courses that she takes to prepare for living there. I thought this is a good idea and given that I have plenty of time, I decided to take a course as well.
The course took three weeks, with about 5 hours of work each week, although more time can be spent learning vocabulary and grammar on my own. Fortunately, speaking both German and English fluently allowed me to learn Dutch relatively easily.
Screenshot of the transcript of a dialogue.
Week one consisted of learning basic introductions and things like talking about yourself, where you live, etc. This was all at a very basic level though. The sections are interspersed with small quizzes to see how well you are doing. The second week built on that by introducing some basic grammar such as articles and pronouns, as well as learning to talk more, including about the weather, which is apparently a popular topic to talk about in the Netherlands. The third week then elaborated more on adjectives and verbs and grammatical structures. The structure of this course was quite good and although I can only say basic things, I don’t think one can expect more from the little effort the course required.
A quiz from week one.Since I was doing this in a relaxed and fun manner I did not practice a lot outside of the course. This was no big problem due to my skills in German, English and basic knowledge of Afrikaans that helped me to understand grammar quickly. While doing other things however I did repeat some phrases to get used to the pronunciation as well as to learn the pronouns and conjugations, which are essential to know. Being able to say some basic things in Dutch is not only fun cause it’s an amusing language I find, but it will also prove useful when I study in the Netherlands, where I hope to learn more to become fluent in the language. I love languages so this would be a lot of fun. Given that my university city bordering Belgium and very close to France, I hope I’ll be able to perfect my French as well. This would make me fluent in four languages, although I do not know if I can achieve this while studying there for just three years given the workload and many other things I will want to do during that time.