Progress Check

Today I was doing some practicing with changing present tense sentences to past tense. I struggled on a few of the ones in my werkboek because I was unaware of some of the “special cases” (these include sal to sou, wil to wou, etc.) and because translations were difficult or incomprehensive.

In this exercise, I would say the sentence aloud in Afrikaans (sometimes this helped me know what the word was even though I didn’t recognize it while it was written down), translate the sentence to English (first the words I already knew and then asking for help for the words I did not know), and then figured out which word was the verb. Once I knew the verb, I used my reference books to create the Verlede Tyd (or past tense) version of the sentence.

My struggles were a bit frustrating but I had a goal of finishing all fifteen in the set. I powered on and eventually got to a point where my heart started glowing. At first it was dim, then it got brighter and brighter until it exploded out of my eyes in tears of joy. I heard myself speaking it, I translated a sentence entirely on my own, and I was able to change the tense of that sentence myself. It was overwhelming and powerful. (NO JOKES, I was sitting in a café doing my studying and I burst out in tears for a minute!)

I wanted to share this right away because it was a very real representation of my progress for myself. I love the Afrikaans language beyond comprehension and it is so encouraging and motivating to notice the progress in myself.