Tag: conjugate

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.

1. 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.
2. Figure out which words I already know and translate those.
3. 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.
4. Find the verb in the Afrikaans sentence.
5. 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.
6. 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.