6th October 2011 Progress Report

I've now harvested 94 words so far this month. I find it hard to comprehend the speed at which I'm learning these words and how little effort it feels that I have to put in to do so. I'm not sure how much of that is the style of learning, and how much is the closeness of Dutch to Swedish and English. I think it's probably a mixture of both as I have tried to learn Dutch vocabulary before but it hasn't stuck as well as this and has taken much more effort, or at least felt like it.

4th October 2011 Progress Report

Today was a nightmare day for learning. I didn't have time this morning for any practice so I left it to the evening when I got home and was tired and distracted. The words just flew out of head and I forgot words that I know I know. Then again, it was one of those days today with English too, when I couldn't think of the word I was looking for so I guess it wasn't too surprising! I'm sure tomorrow will be a better day and I'm not going to let myself get discouraged by a bad day. Ever onwards!

3rd October 2011 Problems with Marriage Words

I had to do some revision of the Dutch Unit 1-3 Pearson Longman Text Book list. I don't know what it is about the word but I do not seem to be able to remember the word echtgenoot which means husband. I also had trouble remembering the word getrouwd - married because I get confused as to whether that is the word I want or huwelijk - marriage. The only word on the topic I seem to be able to remember is vrouw - wife. I did five lots of revision on this set of words.

I also did three lots of revision on the 1000 word list as well as harvesting the eleven words from the last list and planting seven more.

I've harvested 45 words so far this month.

End of the Month and Plans

I'm not going to learn any new words tomorrow, but use the last day of the month to review the words I've already learnt. I do keep forgetting words and muddling them up so I think it's time to take stock again.

I'm pleased with my progress this month, hitting the 500 word mark for the month. I think I will restrict myself to about 200 for October as I have to maintain those 500 words, and I also have 3 computing courses that I'm doing until the middle of December so I'm going to be quite busy.

By the end of the year, I hope to have completed the 1000 most common words list. I'm going to have to think about how I want to continue in the New Year. Will it be focusing on grammar and sentence construction, or learning more words? I might set up my own word lists on memrise to test tenses and irregular verbs.

26th - 27th September 2011 Today's Mistakes

I've now harvested 323 words in Dutch: The thousand most common words in Dutch. These are the mistakes I made excluding typos where I hadn't typed what I thought I had.

English	Correct Dutch	What I put	Comments
crowd	menigte	mensigte
the pork	het varkensvlees	de varkensvlees	literally: pig meat
pleasure	plezierig	pleziering
to leave	verlaten	verloren	verloren is lost
the mistake	de fout	het fout
human being	menselijk wezen	mensilijk wezen
suddenly	plotseling	spoedig	spoedig is soon
adult	volwassene	volwessene

I'm pretty sure I'm muddling up menigte, volwassene and menselijk wezen.

I've got 61 words to harvest to catch up with where I was on the other account. They aren't ready for harvesting yet so tomorrow it will be.

Starting Again with Memrise

Because I logged in to Memrise with my facebook login, I've decided to start again with an independent account so today I've been going through the words I've previously learnt again. I think this is useful revision.

I'm still making silly mistakes such as giving the wrong answer to German and Germany even though I do actually know that the language is Duits and the country Duitsland.

Progress Report 24th September 2011

Today, I've been collecting resources for learning Dutch. I've tried a few times to learn before but it's sort of fizzled out. I love grammar, but find vocabulary very hard to learn.

At the beginning of September, someone on Google+ linked to http://www.memrise.com/. This is a vocab testing program which reminds you to revise the words you've learnt earlier. I decided I wanted to learn 300 words in September.

My progress so far is

Dutch: Dutch Unit 1-3 - Pearson Longman Text Book 61/61 words learnt.

Dutch: Dutch - The thousand most common words in Dutch 384/996 words learnt.


I do keep having to go back and check old words, especially at the moment because I have a cold and I always find I can't focus when I have a cold. I'm not too worried about this because if I can remember anything when ill, I must really know it!