Author: Appeltjie

You never really know when something will change your life. Things enter and leave our lives every day, and the ones that strike us the hardest, the ones that invoke emotions, and the ones that cause us to cry out for more are the things that shape us into the people we are.

This is exactly what happened to me with Afrikaans.

Initially, I matched with a guy on Tinder who was visting the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live) and we hit it off. It was his first time in America and he invited me to hang out with him for the weekend before he left. We did some touristy things and I stayed with him in San Francisco. During this weekend, he sent voice notes and possibly called people back home in South Africa and spoke to them in a language I had never heard before, nor heard of. Every time he spoke it, my heart would sing.

(I got a lot of backlash about this because people figured I was falling in love with the guy)

I couldn’t get enough of it. He left and we said our goodbyes, my intentions stated clearly about coming to visit Cape Town, South Africa later in the year.

A few weeks after this initial interaction occurred, I was blocked. I had no way to contact the guy that introduced me to this language I wanted so badly to learn.  Since I knew my love for this language was not connected to him specifically, I had to come up with a new plan to get help learning Afrikaans.

(For anyone who doesn’t know, Afrikaans is not a very widely spoken language around the world. Finding a program to learn it online was pretty much nonexistent and the free things I found were very inconsistent and not very helpful.)

A friend of mine suggested that I change my Tinder location to Cape Town, South Africa in order to meet more people that spoke that language. I did that, and have now spoken to quite a few Afrikaans people, other South African people, and managed to meet in person several of them as well.

In the months since March 2019, when I first became consciously aware of Afrikaans, I have grown so much as a person, had experiences that I would not have even considered prior, and I know there is so much more in store for me through my learning of this hella lekker language!