Meeting 1:
For our first meeting, we attended an ice hockey game. We thought it would be a great opportunity to learn numbers and colors from each other, as this would help build our basic vocabulary. Since ice hockey is all about the score between the two teams, it seemed like the perfect setting for learning numbers. Additionally, each team has its own distinct colors, which made it ideal for learning the names of different colors as well. During our language exchange, we agreed that we could ask each other questions at any time about pronunciation, meanings, etc. We also shared a few basic rules of our respective languages. For instance, I learned that in Spanish, the letter ‘v’ is pronounced like a ‘b’. The letter ‘h’ is usually silent, but when you have combinations like ‘cha’, ‘che’, ‘chi’, ‘cho’, or ‘chu’, it is pronounced like ‘tsjah’. The letter ‘j’ is pronounced like a hard ‘g’, and so on. These differences are quite distinct from Dutch, which made it a bit challenging at first, but once I got the hang of these pronunciation rules, speaking the words became a little easier.
There were also a few interesting observations with numbers. Starting from number 16, Spanish places the 10 (‘diez’) in front of the second number, in this case 6 (‘seis’), forming ‘dieciséis’. In Dutch, it’s the other way around; we say 6 (zes) first and then 10 (tien).
Another notable difference is that Spanish verbs have both masculine and feminine forms. For example, you have ‘nosotros’ for the masculine form and ‘nosotras’ for the feminine form.
Our goal during the meeting was to take note of the pronunciation rules and letter pronunciations while speaking the words. This way, if the same rule comes up in a future meeting, we can refer back to our notes and not have to repeat everything. Writing things down is a great way to reinforce learning.
Finally, we learned a few sentences related to the hockey game, so that next time we attend a game, we can use them in each other’s language.
Conclusion:
After this first meeting, my conclusion is that Spanish is quite a difficult language when compared to Dutch. The pronunciation of certain letters is quite different, and sometimes you don’t pronounce certain letters at all, like the ‘h’. Additionally, Spanish has masculine and feminine words, something that doesn’t exist in the Dutch language. I noticed that I was quite cautious when pronouncing the words because I didn’t want to make mistakes and wanted to get it right. I hope to gain more confidence during the meetings so I can pronounce the words more fluently. At this stage, I was making quite a few mistakes and had to constantly refer back to my notes.
Learning Dutch also posed some challenges. I now understand why people often say that Dutch is a difficult language to learn. For instance, we have ‘ou’ and ‘au’, which are pronounced the same, but it depends on the word which one you use, and this is something you just have to know. The same goes for ‘ei’ and ‘ij’. This exercise makes you reflect much more on the Dutch language, which I find very interesting.
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