![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More Dutch More Dutch!!!
Jun. 27th, 2013 09:06 pm So my friend Eli loaned me this great book. 201 Dutch Verbs Fully Conjugated In All The Tenses. It actually has a lot more verbs than that but only 201 of them are fully conjugated: the rest have a line of information that lets you work out the conjugations for yourself if you know what you're doing.
So in between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of Code Nederlands I decided it would be good to learn all the 201 verbs. Presumably they're some of the most important, since they were worth writing out in full, and I notice Dutch forms a lot of verbs by adding parts onto existing verbs. For instance "schrijven" is "to write" but "omschrijven" is "to write down." And "huren" is "to rent (from)" but "verhuren" is "to rent (to)." And "grijpen" is "to grip" but "begrijpen" is "to understand." And so on.
So I've been entering the verbs into my flash card app. Some of them are easy because they are related to the English word, or because I've already learned them. "Lopen" is like "lope" and it means "walk or run" so it is easy to remember. "Staan" means "stand" and "leggen" means "lie" and "zitten" means "to sit" and these are all pretty easy for me to remember.
Some of them are just completely out of the blue. I mean "blijken" means "to turn out, to prove." That looks completely unrelated to me and that kind of thing is much harder to remember.
For these I found it easier to use paper flash cards because I can swap cards in and out of a stack easily, which my app does not allow. So I take one card, and repeat it to myself several times, and set a timer and pick up my book. A fiction book in English, because the point is to stop thinking about the Dutch. 60 seconds later the timer goes off, I put the book down, I look at the flash card, and I see if I can remember what is on the other side. I'm trying for the point where I can just barely recall it if I cudgel my memory. I think that, like the last few reps lifting weights, when you can barely do it, *that* is when you are getting stronger/forming new memories.
If I can't remember it, I repeat it again, set the timer again, read something else for a minute again, try again. Once I can get it, I add another card to the stack. Each time I can do all the cards, I add another card to the stack. I can do 20 words in an hour this way. Once I have them, retaining them doesn't seem to take nearly as much time.
I have 170 words entered at this point but I haven't learned them all yet. And I'm only doing the infinitives; past tense roots come next, and then past participles, I think. There are patterns for how these are produced, but there are like nine of them and some verbs don't follow any of them, so I'm not sure how helpful that will be. But once I have the infinitives learned I will enter the pattern types on the cards and see if that helps.
So in between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of Code Nederlands I decided it would be good to learn all the 201 verbs. Presumably they're some of the most important, since they were worth writing out in full, and I notice Dutch forms a lot of verbs by adding parts onto existing verbs. For instance "schrijven" is "to write" but "omschrijven" is "to write down." And "huren" is "to rent (from)" but "verhuren" is "to rent (to)." And "grijpen" is "to grip" but "begrijpen" is "to understand." And so on.
So I've been entering the verbs into my flash card app. Some of them are easy because they are related to the English word, or because I've already learned them. "Lopen" is like "lope" and it means "walk or run" so it is easy to remember. "Staan" means "stand" and "leggen" means "lie" and "zitten" means "to sit" and these are all pretty easy for me to remember.
Some of them are just completely out of the blue. I mean "blijken" means "to turn out, to prove." That looks completely unrelated to me and that kind of thing is much harder to remember.
For these I found it easier to use paper flash cards because I can swap cards in and out of a stack easily, which my app does not allow. So I take one card, and repeat it to myself several times, and set a timer and pick up my book. A fiction book in English, because the point is to stop thinking about the Dutch. 60 seconds later the timer goes off, I put the book down, I look at the flash card, and I see if I can remember what is on the other side. I'm trying for the point where I can just barely recall it if I cudgel my memory. I think that, like the last few reps lifting weights, when you can barely do it, *that* is when you are getting stronger/forming new memories.
If I can't remember it, I repeat it again, set the timer again, read something else for a minute again, try again. Once I can get it, I add another card to the stack. Each time I can do all the cards, I add another card to the stack. I can do 20 words in an hour this way. Once I have them, retaining them doesn't seem to take nearly as much time.
I have 170 words entered at this point but I haven't learned them all yet. And I'm only doing the infinitives; past tense roots come next, and then past participles, I think. There are patterns for how these are produced, but there are like nine of them and some verbs don't follow any of them, so I'm not sure how helpful that will be. But once I have the infinitives learned I will enter the pattern types on the cards and see if that helps.
