Dutch

One of my goals when I received my Fulbright was to use the year abroad to learn another language.  At first I went for the more exotic languages that Marburg had excellent faculty in, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Russian (very hard to find in the US), but after realizing that a year spent learning these languages would not allow me to come close to even a basic conversational level, I started to look at slightly easier, albeit more practical languages, such as Spanish, French, or Italian.  I was foiled again at this juncture, as none of these courses fit into my work schedule well (why is Monday evening the preferred time to teach a language here?).  Keeping my goal in mind, I scanned through the course catalog and found that my options were Modern Irish - Advanced Intermediate (nope!), Middle High German (dead language), and Dutch. 

I had liked my trip to the Netherlands for a conference earlier this year quite a bit, and while there I realized that I could read Dutch fairly well (embarassingly, at first I thought that it was just very poorly spelled German), but as soon as I heard someone speak it I realized that Dutchman can make what I will describe as unnatural sounds.  I am not alone in this viewpoint - a Dutch radio commentator is semi-famous there for saying that "Dutch is not a language, it's a disease of the throat."

Today marks the end of my first week learning Dutch, and my first impressions are that it is a very weird mixture between English and German - since it is a Low Germanic language (not inferior, just that their country is closer to sea level than "High German", which came from Austria/the Alps).  Pronunciation is at times very close to English and/or German, other times the opposite of how it is spelled.  Thankfully, the spelling, grammar, and word order of all three languages are at least similar, as the following example shows.  Equivalent words (or word groups, if English uses a helping verb) are shown in the same color. 

          What is your name?      English
          Wat is je naam?            Dutch
          Was ist deine Name?     German

However, Dutch is still much more a Germanic language than English, so sentence construction and word order is often closer to German than English, as the following example shows.

          How are you called?     English
          Hoe heet je?                Dutch
          Wie heißt du?               German

While it might be too early to make any bold sweeping claims, I feel confident that I'll be able to learn a fair amount of Dutch in one semester (all of Dutch grammar fits into a nice 80 page book that I found) and I'm enjoying the class a lot so far - the professor is very good and clearly loves her subject.  The weirdest thing is learning a foreign language in a foreign language, but even that seems to be going well so far.  And to counteract the obvious "But when will you ever use this?" charge, there is a chance (however remote) that I will do research next summer in Namibia, where Afrikaans (mutually intelligible with Dutch) is widely spoken.  So there.