Learning – Quest For Afrikaans

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.

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.

Tag: Learning

Progress Check

Learning Afrikaans from America, Part 1