There was a lot I got out of the Dutch
session last week. I’ve become a much more conscious language learner as a
result of this class, something I see in my Italian-language class, and getting
to focus completely on how we were being taught and how I was receiving it was
a great way to apply what we’ve been learning.
The very first thing Miranda did in the
lesson was give us a quick outline of what we’d be doing during the lesson. As
someone who’d just gotten out of a lecture and about to go into one immediately
following our lecture, I really appreciated knowing what was about to happen
for the next hour. I was already feeling a bit of the “mental fry” that comes with
jam-packed days, so I really liked having an outline in my head of the lesson.
As bad as it sounds, my thought was, “Oh I can do this. This sounds so easy.” I
could wrap my head around the lesson, something I’ve found that I personally need
as a student.
As we went into the next part of the lesson,
the alphabet and dialogue, my knee-jerk, unavoidable reaction was to relate it
all to English, my first language. To my happy surprise, I found Dutch to sound
very similar to English, though I can already tell I’ll be confused by
spelling. Nothing is as it seems it should be, and as a potential learner, this
scares me. “Can I do this?”, definitely went through my head, thinking of the
distance I have from where I am now, knowing nothing of the language, and then thinking
ahead to all the work that (would) need to be done to become fluent.
Though the first lesson is a little
exciting, it also holds a lot of promise – promise of learning something
completely new, something useful and interesting (it’d look great on a CV
right!), and promise of a whole lot of
work, something that, as a student, I have come to know and hate.
