I'm just going to quote your English replies so the post isn't extremely long.
Reinder wrote:I still remember that you thought my bilingual posts were really helpful, so I'll write my posts bilingual again.
Yes, they are very useful, especially with Frisian since I can already understand a lot of it. Many of the words I don't know can be pretty easily figured out without a dictionary with bilingual replies.
Oh wow, that's really cool. There are not so many native speakers of West Frisian, so that's really cool you know one in real life now.
Yep! I was very surprised when she said she speaks it since there are only about half as many speakers of it as Basque.
The probability of a Frisian speaker going to the same, small group of gender minorities in my area is pretty dang low.
You mean the dictionary by Anne Dykstra? There's three pages of that dictionary
here (last three pages of the document) to see what it's like. Unfortunately it seems a little bit hard indeed to get a English - Frisian dictionary.
That's the one. It would be awesome to have, but I don't think it's worth USD$133 plus shipping to me. I could buy it, but that money could be far better spent elsewhere, and it's not that important. Like I said, I can get by fine with what I have now. Although the direct translation without Dutch as the middleman, along with the examples sentences, would be quite helpful.
Is "hjirre" an emphatic form of "hjir", possibly? What is "hoe't" a contraction of? I was thinking its "hoe it" (as the third person singular pronoun) but that would be redundant, unless that's the point.
I meant to say that learning to speak it came naturally, I didn't make any effort, because it's my native language. I only had to learn how to write it by myself later, which was never taught. In fact, regarding to the Frisian Wikipedia only 17% of the people living in Friesland can actually write Frisian.
It's a shame that Frisian isn't held in very high regard as a written language. I think it would be much better if the language were used a lot more in schools and just anywhere, but I'm not Frisian, so I don't know how Frisian speakers feel about it. But I do get the feeling that some people are starting to prefer Dutch over Frisian, even if Frisian is their native language.
Mm, this might be laziness. It should probably be pronounced as [x], but in some contexts that might just take too much effort, haha. I'm really a beginner in phonology, so I'm sorry for not being able to clear this up for you.
Haha, OK, that make sense. Yeah, it does take quite a bit of effort to pronounce "chtsj" in the middle of a word.
It's really cool to see when someone's interested in my tiny native language, haha. If you have any questions, just feel free to contact me at any time.
I can imagine.
Well, my native language is English, but I'm always surprised and happy when I come across people that have similar interests to me in real life, since they're pretty rare. Probably a similar feeling.
I've read all of your Frisian responses in your post here, and it's very easy to read. Most of the words I didn't know I could figure out from context and the English version, and only had to look up about 10 or so. I probably wouldn't know most of the words if you were to ask me to write in Frisian at this point, but I'll start practicing here very soon.