Greetings to all !
I have finally joined your community, after all these years, after having been goad.... erm....persuaded, by my dear friend Junesun to take the one-month personal Dutch challenge.
My name is JF, short for Jean-François. I am a 52-year-old French-Canadian male, living in Montréal, Québec.
My hobbies and activities are : choral singing, volunteer adult literacy tutoring, working out at the gym, gardening, chatting on Pal Talk, cycling, snowshoeing, camping, etc.
My musical interests are mainly centered around my passion for choral singing, i.e. sacred, Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic, although I have plenty of other contemporary pursuits as well. For example, I am a huge Beach Boys fan.
I speak French and English fluently. Germans keep telling me my German is very good, but, I tend not to believe them
I am conversational in Esperanto. I know a smattering of demotic Greek.
My interest in the Dutch language developed recently, whilst playing CANTR II, a role-playing game. One of my characters strayed into a Dutch town and was suddenly exposed to a lot of Dutch. I noticed right away that my knowledge of German helped me to be able to guess a lot of what was going on, but not enough to fully understand. This teased my desire to find out more about this language.
I would be happy, after 30 days, to simply be able to construct some simple phrases correctly in Dutch. I am particularly interested in the similarities and differences between Dutch and German.
There you go. Hope you find some comment of interest in all this.
I am looking forward to working with you in the apprenticeship of Dutch.
best regards,
jf