By the time I left Kyrgyzstan, my Russian was far from the fluent level I had dreamed of achieving when I first moved there. I will give myself credit though, for my taxi-Russian, my restaurant-Russian, and my Darwin-Russian. Babies are natural conversation starters, I find. Especially when Darwin was super small and squishy, strangers would …
Tag Archives: learning Dutch
must learn Dutch: resources
I wanted to go into more detail about my attempts to learn Dutch. Duolingo. I’ve been using DuoLingo for French… because I love wasting time? I don’t know, I really do enjoy the format. Plus, I studied French in middle school, high school and university, so it’s been nice for my ego to blaze through …
must learn Dutch
No, really. I’m serious this time. I have to learn Dutch. In Kyrgyzstan, I gave up on learning Russian. Work was the ultimate excuse, plus I had reached a decent level of speaking and comprehension. I was good enough at Russian, I told myself. It wasn’t even a personally satisfactory level, I always wished I …
I can’t pronounce my neighborhood
Gentbrugge. Gent + Brugge. Brugge is the Flemish spelling for Bruges, which I pronounce like “bruise” with a “zh” at the end instead of just a “z”. Therefore, Gent+Bruges=Gentbrugge. Right? Wrong. One of my first Flemish lessons occurred in Kyrgyzstan without me really knowing it. The last names of one of our Belgian friends has …