audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
DH and I have been having some fun with learning languages for travel, and now it's become kind of an annual tradition!
The last two years I spent the spring brushing up on my French (DH had to learn it from scratch), in anticipation of summer travels to France. I really enjoyed it. The first trip to France I pretty much just had enough to adhere to the recommended "politesse" - niceties to use when interacting with French people in restaurants, hotels, shops, etc. As a consequence, people in France seemed to appreciate the effort and were very friendly and kind. Well - I could also read menus which was quite useful. DH could do a few things - basic greetings and asking for the check in French, and he used them.
Last year I gained a lot more proficiency. Unfortunately not proficient enough to understand well when someone rattled off a reply in French assuming I was fluent - that would still take hours and hours of listening practice. But I did use it in a few important situations where the other person did not speak English, so it was very useful.
This year, we're tackling Dutch. Now Dutch is not a language that I had really planned to learn, even though my sister-in-law is half-Dutch, speaks Dutch at home, and my nephews are learning Dutch as well as English. But I got tired of not being able to read Dutch words/signs and pronounce them correctly. I decided it was high time to get rid of that particular mystery. And we plan for an extended visit this summer. And even though Amsterdamers speak excellent English in general, it's still nice to have a little Dutch. We can have more fun with our bilingual nephews.
We've been using various tools. There are some really good quality free podcasts, videos, and other materials on the web. Since I was a rank beginner in Dutch, DuoLingo was a good starting point. I also found a really good online site that has other intro material and vocabulary that I am working through.
So here we are, DH and I, another spring and working on languages again!
And if we decide to do more with French, we've decided going to a language school in Aix-en-Provence will be just the thing!!!
Spanish is our second language. We worked on our Spanish quite a bit when we first moved to the Mexican border, including hours of Spanish (Mexican) Language television which sharpened our listening comprehension a great deal.
The last two years I spent the spring brushing up on my French (DH had to learn it from scratch), in anticipation of summer travels to France. I really enjoyed it. The first trip to France I pretty much just had enough to adhere to the recommended "politesse" - niceties to use when interacting with French people in restaurants, hotels, shops, etc. As a consequence, people in France seemed to appreciate the effort and were very friendly and kind. Well - I could also read menus which was quite useful. DH could do a few things - basic greetings and asking for the check in French, and he used them.
Last year I gained a lot more proficiency. Unfortunately not proficient enough to understand well when someone rattled off a reply in French assuming I was fluent - that would still take hours and hours of listening practice. But I did use it in a few important situations where the other person did not speak English, so it was very useful.
This year, we're tackling Dutch. Now Dutch is not a language that I had really planned to learn, even though my sister-in-law is half-Dutch, speaks Dutch at home, and my nephews are learning Dutch as well as English. But I got tired of not being able to read Dutch words/signs and pronounce them correctly. I decided it was high time to get rid of that particular mystery. And we plan for an extended visit this summer. And even though Amsterdamers speak excellent English in general, it's still nice to have a little Dutch. We can have more fun with our bilingual nephews.
We've been using various tools. There are some really good quality free podcasts, videos, and other materials on the web. Since I was a rank beginner in Dutch, DuoLingo was a good starting point. I also found a really good online site that has other intro material and vocabulary that I am working through.
So here we are, DH and I, another spring and working on languages again!
And if we decide to do more with French, we've decided going to a language school in Aix-en-Provence will be just the thing!!!
Spanish is our second language. We worked on our Spanish quite a bit when we first moved to the Mexican border, including hours of Spanish (Mexican) Language television which sharpened our listening comprehension a great deal.