A language learners’ forum

25/01/2021:

Completed Michel Thomas Dutch Foundation Course up to CD2, track 2 (in bursts of 10-15 minutes over the day). Goal is to complete the whole course twice in the next month.

Started going through Assimil again, beginning with lesson one. Because I've completed the first 20 or so lessons of Assimil loads of times, I'm not going to do passive work on them, so started with the active wave (making use of scriptorium method). Once I get to lesson 22, I'll start doing passive/active waves again.

I do these in blocks of 21 lessons (so starting at lesson 1 passive, I'd commence the active wave on lesson 8) - each chunk takes one month to complete (which is nice given there are 84 lessons, so it divides nicely into groups of 21).

Depending on time constraints, I'll restart Colloquial Dutch again, might need to brush through the book first as a refresher.

26/01/2021

Assimil Dutch with Ease lesson 2 (active)
Michel Thomas Foundation up to CD3-3

Decided I won't try and add Swedish to my repertoire until after May (the [hopeful] CNaVT exam month).

27/01/2021

Michel Thomas Foundation up to CD3-10
Lesson 3 of Dutch with Ease (active)

Is the Michel Thomas course good? Daft question perhaps because you've stuck with it up to CD3. I've never really tried any of his courses, but I've had a listen to a couple. The French one (haven't heard it) always garnered bad reviews because of the way he impatiently hectored his students in the recordings. I listened to the German one and the lessons seemed to be a bit haphazard.

Anyway I see you're using a reader. At the time I was studying Dutch I could barely afford the expensive books and couldn't find many readers, but I did find a hard copy of this book which is heavily annotated and covers a lot of useful colloquial constructions. It's edited by William Shetter who wrote one of the first useful grammars for Dutch (I used it).

https://www.pdfdrive.com/reading-dutch- ... 34363.html

The writers are from the 70s and 80s, but well-known. Like Maarten t'Hart, Hubert Lampo, Renate Rubenstein, Kees van Kooten. And forgotten ones like Roger van de Velde

Van Kooten is awesome. My parents have 't Hart lying around, but no idea if he is any good or not.

tarvos wrote:Van Kooten is awesome. My parents have 't Hart lying around, but no idea if he is any good or not.

I always liked the title of his 'autobiography' (more like some memoirs): 'Koot graaft zich autiobio'.

That sketch of his with de Bie 'De vieze man eet een bonbon' is hilarious.

Okay, sorry for hijacking your log.

Le Baron wrote:Is the Michel Thomas course good? Daft question perhaps because you've stuck with it up to CD3. I've never really tried any of his courses, but I've had a listen to a couple. The French one (haven't heard it) always garnered bad reviews because of the way he impatiently hectored his students in the recordings. I listened to the German one and the lessons seemed to be a bit haphazard.

I've completed the Foundation course before, I just (stupidly) allowed my Dutch to lapse, so I'm rebuilding from the bottom up and reinforcing my CEFR-A skills. Given I've got quite a lot of free time right now, I figured I'd do something productive with it

I'd say it's quite a strong course of the MT line (wish they'd made a third component to it.) I suspect the script is heavily based off of the original MT German course, but using native speakers in the delivery.

Le Baron wrote:Anyway I see you're using a reader. At the time I was studying Dutch I could barely afford the expensive books and couldn't find many readers, but I did find a hard copy of this book which is heavily annotated and covers a lot of useful colloquial constructions. It's edited by William Shetter who wrote one of the first useful grammars for Dutch (I used it).

The writers are from the 70s and 80s, but well-known. Like Maarten t'Hart, Hubert Lampo, Renate Rubenstein, Kees van Kooten. And forgotten ones like Roger van de Velde

If one scours the depths of the internet enough, one may eventually be rewarded

(seriously though, this was one of the hardest books I've ever tried to find.)

28/01/2021:
Michel Thomas Foundation completed up to the end of CD 3
Assimil Dutch with Ease lesson 4 (active)

Ug_Caveman wrote:If one scours the depths of the internet enough, one may eventually be rewarded

(seriously though, this was one of the hardest books I've ever tried to find.)

So you'd already bought it?! I had to dig mine out of the storage to remember the name. I had a look through it and indeed it's not an easy book for students in comparison to some modern readers.

Le Baron wrote:

Ug_Caveman wrote:If one scours the depths of the internet enough, one may eventually be rewarded

(seriously though, this was one of the hardest books I've ever tried to find.)

So you'd already bought it?! I had to dig mine out of the storage to remember the name. I had a look through it and indeed it's not an easy book for students in comparison to some modern readers.

"Already" is a strong word for a book I spent several years trying to track down a copy of (I've made progress in my hunt for some other rare-ish books too, I think, might do a thread on them if I'm right...)

For reading I have quite a lot of material. I've got a collection of about 5-6 bilingual Dutch readers and a number of Dutch non-fictional children's books (a series of mini-encyclopedias on various topics like dogs or trains or pharaohs or [my personal favourite] space). When I'm more comfortable with my skills my plan is to set myself a task of working through one book each week and writing a summary of the things I've learnt from each book in Dutch, so I can develop my wider vocabulary over a range of topics.