Afrikaans – Quest For Afrikaans

February 1, 2020

Utilizing Voice Messages

When I first started this quest to learn Afrikaans, I obviously didn’t know anything. I didn’t know any words, phrases, cultural references, etc. So much of what I have learned has been listening to audio messages. I never really used audio messages before this, so it was a bit strange to get used to listening and creating them.

One of the best things about audio messages is that you can listen to them more than once. It is one of the best and most useful tools I have used in this entire experience. Eventually, I hope to make a collection of recordings to help me practice; kind of like audio flashcards.

Any language has an accent of some sort, often these are regional, but can also be more culturally intertwined as well. I want to sound as “Afrikaans” as possible when I speak Afrikaans. I understand there will always be little things that will give away my American-ness, but I want to strive for that accent. So, by learning and copying the sounds made when words and phrases are said aloud by native Afrikaans people, my pronunciation is largely influenced by their pronunciation.

I cannot tell you how many times I listen to voice notes and try to repeat what is said, exactly as it is said. Often times, I don’t know what I am saying, but the pronunciation practice still helps my tongue and mouth formulate muscle memory for words and sounds. I still do this, although now I understand more of what is being said.

The bottom line is that audio messages are my friends! I love them, I love getting them, I love using them, and they are ridiculously helpful.

January 13, 2020

Verlede Tyd (Past Tense) Practice

The last two weeks I have been focusing on conjugating sentences into past tense. The concept is pretty simple, but then there are (like in English) special cases where things are a bit different. To allow my learning time to be the most effective, I would go through a few different things per exercise.

Read the sentence to be conjugated aloud (to someone who speaks fluent Afrikaans. If I say it myself, there is no one to tell me if I pronounced it correctly or not). Sometimes I had to say the sentence a few times before I pronounced everything correctly.
Figure out which words I already know and translate those.
Figure out the rest of the sentence with help (either from someone helping me or google translate*). Sometimes (okay, most of the time) in order to make the sentence makes sense in English, direct translations were not possible. Other times, rearranging of the English words had to be done. It is a bit confusing.
Find the verb in the Afrikaans sentence.
Conjugate the sentence. Sometimes this was pretty simple. Exchange the verb for het and put a ge + original verb at the end of the sentence. The special cases confused me a bit and I kept having to refer back to my book. Some of the special cases are actual different words and some of them only apply when the verb begins with certain letters.
Read the conjugated sentence aloud again. Hopefully any corrections with non-conjugated words from the early reading are able to be used again (that didn’t happen as much as I wished it had).

My biggest struggle in this exercise (other than getting distracted and digressing into unrelated topics) was pronunciation. I felt that words that I already knew what they meant or referred to, I should have been better at speaking them. There were other parts that were difficult, and I definitely stumbled a few times with sentences that involved the word nie or had extra information that I couldn’t place into the STOMPI format.

My “teacher” and friend, Anton, said that he felt my biggest struggle was utilizing my short term memory. Words that we had gone over in the previous sentence or only a couple sentences earlier, I couldn’t remember what they meant or how to say them.

Next up: Toekomende Tyd (Future Tense)!

*Google translate is not always correct. It seems to do a mostly good job, but some of the words that have multiple meanings or are a bit unusual sometimes don’t translate appropriately.

January 5, 2020

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.

January 2, 2020January 5, 2020

Learning Afrikaans from America, Part 1

Learning a new language is difficult. Period. No one will argue with that. However, learning a language that is not a very common or a well-known language, is arguably more difficult.

Lots of popular and well known languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc. have a plethora of options available to learn them; books, audio books, apps, learning guides, social groups of other people also learning that language, just to name a few. I live in a suburb of San Francisco, so there is a significant amount of diversity nearby, so finding like-minded learners or native speakers of popular languages is not difficult.

Choosing to learn a language that many Americans have not even heard of makes learning it a bit more of a challenge. I searched online and found a couple things that seemed decent at least at teaching some of the more basic vocabulary, but I knew that long term, this wasn’t going to be a solution for me to become fluent.

Meeting people who spoke the language was going to probably be the best, most viable option. I was a bit nervous as I was going to use a dating app to do that and I was asking people for their time. I couldn’t really afford to compensate someone monetarily, but I hoped that I would be intriguing enough to spark someone’s interest and willingness to help me.