Rachael's Ramblings

This weekend I cleaned my house. As in I reorganized and rearranged all my books and movies and dusted and scrubbed every surface from the floor on up. My apartment is now cleaner than it has ever been since I moved in. It's a rather nice feeling. I'm not 100% certain why I decided to clean so thoroughly. I started out with the desire to clean up all the papers scattered around my desk so I'd have a clean work and organized workstation. It just kind of avalanched from there and I couldn't stop myself.

Now that everything is clean, I'm getting to work on the reason why I needed a clean and organized workstation. I'm learning Dutch! I decided on Friday that I really needed to get serious about this so I tried searching the William and Mary online catalog to see what kind of Dutch grammar and vocabulary books the library might have. I turned up two or three books, none of which were of much use at all. So I sent an IM to the reference librarians. I wish I could have seen the face of the one who got my message of "I'm a history PhD student and I need to learn Dutch for my research. What kind of resources does the library have to help me?" The initial response was "Let me search for a bit and get back to you." We IMed for a bit about what I'd found and about what the librarian was able to find (the same not much I'd discovered on my own). Then the research librarian tried searching the regional system of which W&M is a part. Jackpot! The Williamsburg Public Library has online access to every Rosetta Stone program. This is the best language learning software out there and usually costs over $300 per language and I have free access to over 30 different languages. How cool is that!?

I've completed most of the exercises for Dutch Unit 1, Lessons 1, 2, and 3. Obviously I'm still just beginning, but I'm getting there and I feel like this system may work well for me. There are a few times when I'm trying to think beyond where they want me to be so I have lots of questions and confuse myself. I'm going to buy a Dutch grammar book to answer those questions but I'm mostly just going to try going through this program. There are 19 units and each unit has multiple lessons so it is going to take quite some time but I'll get there.

I only have one major problem with the system so far. In each lesson, there are multiple types of exercises you can do. You can focus on listening and reading together, just listening, just reading, speaking, or writing. For the speaking part, a recorded voice says a phrase, you repeat the phrase into a microphone, and a voice print analysis tells you how close you got to the sound of the native speaker. I fail every time. There are some letters, especially g, that I know I'm not pronouncing correctly. But some words I think I'm saying dead on the way it should be and I'm still failing. Since I have access to basically all the Rosetta Stone language programs, I opened up the one for learning US English and did the speaking exercises for the very first lesson. I failed all those as well. I can't say a boy, a girl, a cat, or a dog the way a native English speaker would. Knowing that made me feel somewhat better about the speaking Dutch bit. I guess I'll just have to trust my ear and perhaps pester the professor at W&M that speaks Dutch to get some help on the g's.

For now I'm off to finish up lesson 3 (if the stupid interface would stop freezing up) and then I'll have to get to work on writing my lecture for my class tomorrow. I'll keep y'all updated as to my Dutch progress.