The Flemish polyglot

Picture this (and I’m sure you are all familiar with what I am going to say): There is an upcoming language carousel, a polyglot event, a meeting with people speaking several languages or just an occasion for you to practice your target language. You are all excited and pumped. Adrenaline’s flowing. In your head you have it all figured out. You know exactly what you are going to say. You anticipated the many questions they may ask you or you may ask them. You looked up some words you may need (better be prepared, right?). You did a mental warm-up. To make a long story short, you are ready to have a fluent conversation in one of your target languages. You can already see yourself nailing it! Yeah! Tsjaka (as we say in Dutch, including the arm movement)! And then ... Euhm ... Blank ... Nothing comes … You stutter like a toddler. You can’t even remember the simplest words and you end up hiding from the other guests the rest of the evening. And when you get home, you feel like a lose...

Grammar books mean instant happiness. I just love love LOVE them. I can’t get enough of grammar, the more the better, no, the faster the better! Yes, picture a little kid jumping for joy when opening a present … The thing is, it is great to dive into something and have a solid base after a reasonably short amount of time, but I also put a lot of pressure on myself by wanting to do just that. Yeah, I get pretty tired of myself sometimes. But still I do it again and again … Two of my recent acquisitions are Grammatica van het Afrikaans and Grammar matters, Bulgarian grammar. It’s like my birthday, Santa Claus and Christmas all in one. Exactly what I like, an overview of the tricky grammar points in both languages. I have been studying Bulgarian all in all for about two and a half years now (with a gap in between, where I didn’t do anything) and I started studying Afrikaans early December, along with Faroese. I never planned to study these languages. It just happened … L...