Meeting 5
For this meeting we both garthered some sports magazines. The idea was to practise pronunciation and translation. The dutch language has some hard words for a finnish person. In finnish we don’t really have anything harder than the ng-sound. In dutch there are a few sounds that I struggled with. Ch- sound in some words seems to be quite impossible for me to say correctly. Ch in the beginning of the word is similar to the words “chapter” and “charter”. That didnt create a problem. Ch in the middle of the word its this weird bugger sound which sounds horrible even from a native speaker. At the end of the word its usually attached to the letter S (-> sch) which is then pronounced as [sjjj].
This time we focused mostly on words which have two of the same letters in the middle of the word. In holland double and single letters are pronounced equal, except for a/e/o/u/i in certain situations. For example the word ”kenttä” is easily pronunced as ”kentä” by a dutch person. Usually finnish words that have the letters ä, ö or y take some time to get right but I didn’t hear Mark having any issues with those, for example the word “yöllä” came out perfectly.
We got so carried away with reading that we didn’t have time for the translations that we planned for this meeting, so we decided to continue with that the next time.
Meeting 6
Football related magazines turned out to be a really nifty tool for learning new words. While translating you also learn a lot about how to form a complete sentence.
Translating some sentences was a bit easier than pronuncing silly sounds. Through the context and the looks of the word it was quite easy to find out at least the main idea of the sentence, even if some words were not familiar to me.
Translating finnish sentences that include unfamiliar words can be difficult because there are quite some words that are nowhere near the same word in another language. Therefore I didn’t expect much from Mark when we started with this meeting. But in the end he managed to exceed my expectations.
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