Kommunikationsvanskeligheder

Yesterday we started our final chapter in our Danish book. It was called, ""Kommunikationsvanskeligheder". Try to say that 10 times quickly, or just try to say it once! I can't believe we are already at the end of our book. We have 2 classes left of our beginners class. I'm not sure what we will do the last week of class but we will finish the book next week. Michael got a quote from the school for the intermediate and advanced classes and then sent those off for approval from TI. The guy wrote Michael back and said, "If your next email is in Danish, you go right ahead". Naturally he wrote back a short, "Tak for det. Hav en god dag!" We are paying up front for the next two set of classes because the money that TI gave us for classes expires at the end of November. We figured just pay for it all now and we can take both classes and not just the next one. I think a lot of people still think we are in a big class or with other people, but no, it is just Michael and I and the teacher. Intensive private instruction. We have been though all sorts of hurdles and what I think might be steps in learning a foreign language. From forgetting the easy stuff sometimes to not being able to understand anything because there was so much that we were learning that it got a little overwhelming. I had a big moment the other day. There are "Den" and "Det" words. The equivalent of "The" but different words use a different "The's". We had been told from day one that there is no rule and you just know or at some point you will be able to hear if it sounds funny, and while we were writing our Simpsons papers, it finally happened to me. I wrote, "det" read the sentence and thought that doesn't sound right, changed it to "den", looked up the word to see if i was correct, and I was!! YEA!! An itty bitty little milestone :)

Out teacher has started to give us copies of a newspaper called, "Overblik" and questions to answer about the articles. It is a newspaper designed for those who can't read well but many language schools use it for a learning tool. It's been good practice to not only read but to try to retain the information we are reading. Which is much harder then it seems. I understand now why in 2nd grade you have to read what seemed like easy books and answer what seemed like easy questions. I remember struggling with it sometimes as a kid and always having to go and look back for the answers but as I got older I just thought it was that my concentration wasn't that great back in 1st,2nd 3rd grades( ok, and all the way up till 10th,11th,12th grades too ;) ) But really, it is pretty difficult to start to read and retain the info at the same time. Fascinating. And believe it or not, It's difficult for perfect smart Michael too!!! Which in turn makes things a little easier for me. Slowly its getting easier to store the info from an article, but it takes a great deal of work. Short passages don't give me too much of a problem, but the longer ones do.

It has also been interesting to see how Michael and I both have different strong and weak points when it comes to Danish, and whats even more interesting is that our strong points compliment each other. That works great for us!