もう長い時間日本語を勉強している私は、能力をアップして、今より正しくペラペラ話したいと思っています。話すときは、まだまだめちゃくちゃな日本語が出てしまいますよ。時々男のようの表現、不自然な文法などを使ってしまうんからです。じゃ、頑張りましょう！

Good stuff.

this is a good site if you need to look up words. Good luck!

Awesome post. That’s what I did / am doing with Spanish. One tip I’ll mention that’s helpful is that my Kindle has been great for this. I had the Harry Potter series in PDF (mostly fan translation — not so good from a literature standpoint but if anything adds to the authenticity!), andconverted it into Kindle Format. What helped was installing a Spanish language dictionary on the Kindle and marking unknown words, looking them up instantly (i.e. keep the cursor there and a Spanish translation pops up). Finally, every so often I would go through prior annotations and rip all of the sentences with new vocabulary into my Anki deck. I got through the entire series in Spanish and it has been very, very helpful.

matt

Just thought I’d leave a great website link for SRS sentences….only good for German, French, Spanish and Portuguese I’m afraid. www.linguee.de.

You put in any word or sentence fragment you would like to learn (in target language or English) and then it’ll come up with tons of examples. You can then copy and paste these into Anki or whatever SRS programme you use.

In January and February I spent about 200 hours total on reading Dutch using parallel texts, where one side is English and the other side is Dutch, and the corresponding sentences line up with each other. I also listened to the corresponding Dutch audiobooks while reading. After all this effort, I’m now able to read regular adult novels in Dutch, and I can understand a good portion of spoken Dutch.

To test myself, I went to Belgium in mid-February to a “language festival” in Leuven, and I attended a series of 1-hour lectures in Dutch about various other languages (Polish, Lingala, Kurdish, and Czech), and I was able to understand what the instructors were saying in Dutch (and participate somewhat).

So, the short story is that you don’t get Dutch “for free” just by knowing German…it’s not mutually intelligible…but with knowledge of German, it’s pretty easy to get yourself going quite well in Dutch in a few hundred hours of practice. Some novels are still harder than others, so I’m continuing to practice. I’m definitely nowhere near perfect, and my speaking and writing skills still need a lot more work, but I can read novels happily without a dictionary and I can speak and write enough to get by, so I’m pretty happy so far.

I learned Dutch by watching TV. They have a lot of interesting programming on social issues like homelessness, people with disabilities, immigrants, gays, and, of course, drugs and sex (“Spuiten en slikken”). In general the quality of television is much higher than either American or German television. The best part? All of their television is put up on uitzendinggemist.nl (means “missed broadcast”) and most of it has captions for the deaf.

Cheers,
Andrew