Flenglishious

So, almost a year now, Flemish classes are over for the summer, and I guess you'd say our Flemish vocabulary has reached a few hundred words. Our sentence structure, while not perfect or in the right order, is recognizable as a sentence.

As with any new language, reading is not so difficult and always the first thing you grasp. I'm not saying I'm there, of course.

Understanding a native (speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y) is no longer impossible.

But speaking it yourself . . . well, that's something else altogether.

It should have been obvious from the start, but I think I finally figured it out. We've just been doing it all wrong.

The speaking part, I mean.

I thought it was my accent.

And it is, but it's more than that.

Like, the word for "no" is "nee".

Not "knee" like we say it, but "nay" like hay, bay, say, and no way.

To say "nay" properly you hold your mouth like you're saying "you". Try it.

"Nay" while holding your mouth like you're saying "you".

Near impossible? Well, there you have it. In a nutshell (a.k.a. notedop). If you simply can't hold your mouth in something akin to a goldfish while at the same time saying "hey", then it just sounds wrong.

Now that the light bulb finally came on, I can concentrate more on the pronunciation of my growing vocabulary because there are a whole host of words using this same technique. I'm not pretending to have the ability to lose the accent and native speakers may still cock their head and ask me to repeat what I said, then immediately revert to English. How do they know this?!

But at the very least when someone asks if I'm fluent in Dutch yet, I can say "nay" as in "you".