We met up to watch a hockey match together. As the breaks are 20 minutes long, we took the opportunity to talk and exchange opinions especially at those times. We talked about many things related to the matches and learned to say words and phrases in the other language. We found it a good occasion to learn the colours and numbers, using the kits of both teams as a reference.
We learned all the basic colours and also how to count from one to 20 and the pronunciation. We discovered that there are many differences in the way phonemes are pronounced in the Netherlands and in Spain and learning to pronounce them correctly was really difficult at the beginning.
The most difficult thing for me was learning to pronounce different letters that are pronounced completely differently in Spain. For example, the letter “W” in the Netherlands is pronounced like the letter “V” in Spain and the letter “V” in the Netherlands is pronounced like the letter “f” in Spain.
When we realised all these big differences, we decided that the best thing to do was to focus on pronunciation in order to have a basis on which to build our vocabulary for future meetings.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed the meeting. I find it really interesting that we are offered this possibility to learn about other cultures and languages and why not also about our own.
I think we made a good decision to write down the pronunciation rules because this allowed us to check them before saying the words and even though we had to look at the notes all the time, I think it gave us confidence and allowed us to speak more fluently.
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