Before I visited Italy four years ago, I spent several weeks working my way through a teach yourself Italian course. The language is similar enough to Spanish, French, and Latin (each of which I had studied either in high school or at college) that I thought I would be able to master enough to engage in basic conversations.
How wrong I was. People would ask me the time and I would stare blankly, trying to remember how to say 14--if only the Italians weren't on a 24 hour clock I would have fewer numbers to remember. I tried chatting with an attractive clerk at a record store, asking for her recommendations of current popular music, but only badly formed fragments of Spanish would come out. Spanish may be close to Italian, but for Italians that haven't studied the language for some time it is very much a foreign language.
My trip to The Netherlands was planned rather hastily at the last minute, but I still left myself some time to learn some basic language skills. Once again, I failed miserably. This time, I feel myself starting to formulate phrases in German, which I studied for two years in college. Dutch shares a lot in common with German, but the two languages feel further apart than Italian and Spanish.
At least I've learned most of the letter sounds, although I still get a little confused by the proper pronunciation when three or four vowels strung together with no consonants in sight.
I've been trying to teach Jana how to say "gracht", a common suffix on tram stops--I think it means canal or something. Not that I know how to say it properly, but it's fun to string the guttural sounds together.
