Does anyone have good recommendations on where to go once you’ve finished the language learning apps?
I finished the apps almost a year ago, and have been watching kids cartoons dubbed into dutch for 2-ish years.
I had a lot of trouble starting a year ago, when I moved to Groningen. I had a lot of trouble, despite working on it daily for 2 years, understanding what anyone was actually saying. (I think due to regional dialects - most of my friends were from the Achterhoek, and the apps had taught me Amsterdam newscaster Dutch). It didn’t help that when I would try to speak Dutch, people would pretend to not understand what I was trying to say. (I mean close friends, not strangers. My best experiences speaking Dutch were actually with strangers in Groningen.) It was super demoralizing, and between that and a bunch of other stuff, I haven’t seriously studied dutch in about a year.
I’ve been back home in the US for 8 months, which is my current location. I know I need to pick up Dutch again, but it’s just such a massive mental block for me. I still have most of my vocab, but word order fucking kills me. And I still can’t understand Achterhoeks worth a damn.
I tried the language sloth, but the Dutch class over there is too basic. I can go back to watching my kids shows dubbed into Dutch, but that won’t help my issue of understanding the Dutch that people actually speak.
I especially need to practice generating sentences, either verbally or written. I got my dutch friends to stop ragging on me, but the stalemate we ended up with has them speaking Dutch and English and me answering in English. I will sometimes app them in Dutch, but I always run it through google translate beforehand to catch any errors.
I really, really would like to be able to speak Dutch and to understand the Achterhoek accent (if not the dialect itself). Does anyone have suggestions for how I should go forward from here? I havent found watching Dutch tv particularly helpful - I wish I could understand de rijdende rechter, or wie is de mol, but I’m just not there. Any suggestions are super welcome!