I've had a special place in my heart for Dutch since 2009, when I decided to seriously learn
a language after several failed childhood attempts at Japanese, Russian, and French. I was
eighteen at the time, and I used one of the older Teach Yourself books. I found a Dutch copy
of Le petit prince in a local library. I watched Spongebob Squarepants on Dutch Nickelodeon.
But then my university semester picked up and I abandoned Dutch. I took up French a couple
months later when I decided to transfer into a language program, but Dutch has still held my
fancy for quite awhile.
Two years ago, I spent a somewhat significant time on Dutch. I had about 450 sentence cards
on Anki, but my vocabulary was still weak, and I didn't really reach a high-intermediate
level in the language. Then I received a bunch of Japanese books for Christmas that year and
tossed Dutch out the window in favor of JapaneseI decided I had dabbled enough in Dutch
to satisfy whatever curiosity I had, and that I would move on to greener pastures. That, of
course, is my common excuse for wanderlust, but whatever.
All that to say, I've decided to make another earnest attempt at Dutch! I've been doing my
usual methods of Anki sentences + plenty of radio listening. I hope to be at a high
intermediate level by the end of the year, at which point, I'll decide whether to continue
or not. I would like to largely understand radio programs, cartoons, and news and Wikipedia
articles. I've been surprising myself at how much I remember from my previous studies, and
Dutch feels like a language I half know. Anyways, I'll post my progress on here to keep
track of it and to see whether my goals are reasonable or not!
Anyways, thus far I've been creating Anki sentences for about a week, going at ~20 a day. That seems to be a decent pace right now. My sentence sources are online forums, the original Dutch version of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis), and Wikipedia articles. Once I have more of the common basic words under my belt, I'll start using sentences from Harry Potter en de steen der wijzen. I've been listening to plenty of news radio, mostly through BNR on an iOS app. I have a small grammar book that I might review soon as well.
