Happy Friday!
It’s time for my weekly check-in. I made good progress working on the Kanji backlog this week.
BACKLOG:
Kanji: 526
Vocab: 1579
Grammar: 457
While unpacking, I discovered a Dutch textbook my mom gifted me 20ish years ago, and decided to get back into studying Dutch, too. It’s my heritage language - both my parents are native speakers, but they spoke English to us growing up. When in Canada, do as the Canadians do.
I wonder if I can find somewhere to start a Dutch study log.
Edit: You know what? I’m just going to add it here in a collapsed section.
Weekly Dutch study update:
Growing up, my grandparents spoke mostly Dutch, so when they came to Canada to watch us every summer, we did get some exposure to the language. We’d go to the Netherlands to visit them once every 4 years. I’d say I’m able to carry on basic conversations in a casual setting. My main goal is to identify and patch up holes in my knowledge and get to a B2/C1 level.
Resources:
- Teach Yourself Dutch by Gerdi Quist & Dennis Strik (2003 edition) ← the one I got from my mom
- Basic Dutch, a Grammar and Workbook, by Jenneke A. Oosterhoff (2nd Edition, c.2024)
- Intermediate Dutch, a Grammar and Workbook, by Jenneke A. Oosterhoff (2nd Edition, c. May 2025)
- Anki: I found a few decks, A0-A2, and B1-B2, but there are less than 3000 cards total, so I’ll likely have to build my own deck as I run across new words.
The plan is to go through them in parallel, a chapter of 1 and then a chapter of the other. Teach Yourself Dutch is more rounded, with listening and reading passages centered around a new topic each chapter. Basic Dutch/Intermediate Dutch are pure grammar. Both purport to finish at B2 level.
So far, I’ve breezed through chapter 1 on each, since the basic stuff is all review to me. I’m working on chapter 2 of Basic Dutch (on pronouns) and have done 2 of 6 exercises. Once I finish chapter 2 in Teach Yourself Dutch I’ll stop and start compiling that Anki deck.