400!

Two milestones tonight: I made it past page 400 and finished chapter 13. It was 40 pages long, which is 8% of the book. Chapter 15 is even longer. Chapter 14 and the Epilog are much shorter.

I will post my thoughts on Chapter 13 later.

On to the end!

Word from a classicist

This morning I was complaining to the GF about my slow progress. I spent a lot of time yesterday reading two pages.

"Now can you see why I say I don't really know Latin and Greek?" she asked. She explained once again that she was told that you needed a PhD to be really fluent. At that, one only becomes a fluent reader. She has a BA in classics. She also explained that studying both languages meant she couldn't be as good at one or the other. She can read a fair amount of what's posted at the Greek Orthodox church where her sons are in the scouts.

While I doubt I'll be a fluent reader of De eeuw van mijn vader I'm sure I can become a fluent reader of Dutch for the following reasons:

1. Unlike classicists, I can listen. There are lots of broadcasts of various types.

2. As a living language, I can find everything in Dutch, in terms of register. Mainly pompous high-register prose survives in the classics. In Dutch, I can now read a fair amount of ordinary news stories.

I'm wondering if my struggles to read Dutch will be similar to what happened when I started reading Spanish. After failing to read 100 Years of Solitude I got Love in the Time of Cholera. From there, I looked up authors I should read. I read books by Guatemala's Nobel Laureate, Miguel Asturias. Eventually, I got around to Carlos Fuentes. Although he's a great author, he's not Mr. Vocabulary like the others. The experience was amazing. I read his books straight through.

100 Years of Stylitude

When you're learning a new language, a new author or speaker is jarring. One thing that makes De eeuw van mijn vader so difficult is the abundance of authors. Geert "Big" Mak quotes extensively from various family members, other historians, and contemporary news accounts. The sources he quotes from vary in style due to the fact that they are from different people in different eras. He also varies his own style. When writing about events, the sentences are short and clear. When writing about ideas, his sentences get extremely long, and his vocabulary becomes very dense.

In terms of content, a couple of loose ends come to mind that didn't quite fit in my chapter summaries. First, Mak describes the death of Hendrikus Colijn in the rudest terms. He was forever the accomodator, even after the occupation was under way. He wrote against resistance and died in Germany in 1944. Also, I would like to have seen the death of Kaiser Wilhelm mentioned. He died in June of 1940, in the recently occupied Netherlands. I wonder how the Germans handled it and what effect it had on the Dutch.

I am now on page 337, in the middle of a long chapter.

As slow as ever

I'm reading the shortest chapter in the book. The only problem is, I'm bogged down in very difficult vocabulary again as Mak describes the horrors of war and has lengthy passages from his father's notes from the period. There is a lot of word researching, from the dictionary, to the computer and back to the dictionary.

For a while, I was starting to read whole paragraphs. This is almost like the beginning of the book.

Enjoyment

After reading the post about other big books I've read, the GF pointed out that it didn't seem like I enjoyed any of it. While much of it was a grind to the end, there were some I enjoyed.

War and Peace: This book really is good. It takes a long time, but the story moves fast all the way through.

The Bible: For entertainment, it's uneven. I'm glad I read it from cover to cover, but I'll never read the "Begats" again. I suppose someone finds them of interest. In the Old Testament I really liked Proverbs. Some of it is hilarious. In the New Testament, I really liked Matthew, which portrays Jesus as a man of action.

Don Quijote: This book is hard because it is so old. Spanish hasn't changed as much as English, but it has changed more than Portuguese. Still, it's entertaining, though uneven.

De eeuw van mijn vader: This is my introduction to Dutch life. In spite of Geert "Big" Mak's large vocabulary and long sentences, it is exhilerating every time I look at the bookmark. Each time, it's closer to the end. Learning a language is usually a great joy. It's like opening a door where you didn't know there was one. You walk in and just keep going. Sometimes it feels like you're falling forever, the way parachutists must feel at the beginning of a jump I suppose.

This is the first time I have started a language from scratch since I first set out to become bilingual in Spanish. The thrills are different. In Spanish I could ask directions right away. In Dutch there is no-one to talk to, but it is exciting to hear things on the radio and TV. Also, the book is kind of an alternate universe. Radio came to the Netherlands in a different way than it did in the US. The 1934 air race that Mak writes about was likely reported in the US, but I doubt if it captured imaginations the way it did in the Netherlands. The book is very interesting, and I always look forward to the chance to read it. It also generates many questions.

My next post will be about the book specifically. I am closing in on the end of Chapter 6.

Silence

I'm house sitting now and on a different computer. So as not to tax it, I'm not playing any podcasts. Consequently, I have been doing my Dutch reading in silence. It's wonderful.

Previously, I had always read while listening to somthing, pounding linguistic competence into my thick skull. I listened to either Radio Nacional de España to assimilate good grammar and do better on my next test, Radio Nederland to reinforce what I was reading, or something from Portugal on occasion to not leave that language behind.

I always used to tell my ESL students to listen to radio and TV in English. I would tell them, "If you really want to speed things up, listen and read at the same time."

This silent time has helped me remember something else I have observed: Many kids are semiliterate because they have too much noise in their lives. Learning to read must be done in silence.

It is only in the past couple of days that there has been a major breakthrough: I read several pages without using the computer. For whatever reason, I was able to figure out word roots and only use the printed Dutch English dictionary. Ironically, I never would have thought of reading Dutch in silence if it hadn't been forced.

My Linguistic Progress So Far

It has taken a while for Dutch syntax to start sinking in. Yesterday, I had a breakthrough with verbs. My dictionary work was markedly improved, because I was able to figure out the root right away and look it up, instead of using the monolingual Van Dale first.

Still, I'm in a place that's frustrating. Last night I heard a news podcast that mentioned Letterman. Because of the English segments, I knew what it was about, but I don't know their take on it. On the other hand, there were a couple of other podcasts of general news, and I understood the first 5 minutes of each one. That was exciting.

Reading can also be frustrating. Chapter 4, which I'll post more about later, has a lot of discussion about the Dutch Reformed Church's internal politics. I think Mak's father was a minister, but I'm not sure yet. At times, ministers and ministry are mentioned seperately. I know he did a lot of work with the church, but I wonder in what capacity exactly. It is clear that he wasn't in charge.

In spite of the frustration, I know more than I did before.