Me almost throwing a notebook at a wall

Hi all!

When I moved to Belgium, I started studying French with Babbel Live. These were online classes where people joined from everywhere in the world. Everytime a different teacher and a different group. At some point, I was in the same class as someone called João, who was also Portuguese, also a designer, and also immigrated to Belgium. It felt like a big coincidence, so we kept in touch! Now, he and a friend started a podcast interviewing artists about language! I think it’s such an interesting topic — thinking about how our mother tongues inspire us, and how working in a second language can influence us.

I’m lucky that so much of my workday is still done in my mother tongue, even though I’m abroad. And yet, the new languages start to sip in in new and fun ways, as I make more comics in French, and as I write in English with my writing group.

Anyway, all this to say that João invited me to their podcast. I cannot for the life of me listen to my own voice so I don’t know how much of our conversation ended up in this episode, but if you want to check it out it’s here! I hope it’s nice!

Because two foreign languages is not enough, this semester I’m taking Dutch classes once a week. They are 4 hours long, and while the teacher is very nice, I feel like traditional languages classes are bit counterproductive at times and tend to kill my joy for learning. For example, this week we spent hours (HOURS!) drilling on a very small grammar detail, explaining it, practising it in various exercises, so that in the end the teacher tells us that most Dutch speakers make this mistake and we will probably hear it said wrong often. AAAAH! This drives me crazy! I just wanted to throw the notebook at the wall and quit.

So I’m trying to convince myself to study it in other ways. I found a kids’ book that is almost my level, and I’m slowly reading it with the help of google translate.

The whole book is printed in a light green paper, so nice.

I complain a lot about the classes but some progress is happening. This week, I did a workshop in Ieper and, even though I talked in English, participants made their exercises in Dutch and I was happy to realise I could read some parts of the student’s works!

Groetjes, (←That’s how you finish emails in Dutch)
Joana