Tag: learning Languages

Making a Dictionary

Dear Liza,

With you living in Denmark and me trying to learn Danish, I thought I would put some effort into developing our vocabularies.

To get along in any language, you need to understand how the words go together, and your teachers will know more than I do about sentence structures and grammar. But I can help, too.

So, I am making an dictionary. I will learn words as I make it, and once it is done I can send it to you and it can help you develop your Danish vocabulary. As you can see, I am hunting pictures FIRST, and I will look up and write the words NEXT.

Pictures make everything easier to remember, so this is an illustrated dictionary. The pictures come from magazines and my collage box, and it is organized by TOPIC rather than ABCs.

For example, Numbers…..

Animals…….


Faces…

And like that.

For the book itself, Auntie Bridgett has let me have an old sketchbook that she doesn’t care for. Cousin Kestrel drew in it when she was little, so I am keeping her drawings so it will be more special. I will ask Auntie Bridgett to alter the cover a bit to say “More than 140 Danish words…”

With everyone’s help, we can meet this new challenge.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Playing Scrabble en Francais

Dear Liza,

You know Auntie Bridgett and I have been studying French for years now. We do an hour or so of Duolingo online every morning. We practice talking to each other in French when Grandpa Nelson isn’t around (because we don’t want to be rude). And now we have a new way to learn.

For her Christmas present, I made Bridgett a French Scrabble set. The ones you can buy in France are a little different from American sets, since French uses more vowels. The accents and other bits that are not letters (like the accent over the ’e’ in cafe) are not on the letter tiles.

I went online to make sure I had the right number of each letter and the right value on each tile, because some were different. Part of the gift, of course, was an official French Scrabble dictionary. We can play on our American board.

The other day, we had our first practice game. We know more than two thousand words, so we felt very confident. But it was a challenge!

Whatever seven letters you have on your rack are all you have to work with, and sometimes they are not very promising.

Still, we stuck it out, helping each other when we needed it. There was a lot of “fishing” in the dictionary, looking for words that used just those letters.

We have played a few games now, but still haven’t finished one. But practice, while possibly not leading to perfection, will certainly lead to improvement. And besides, it’s fun, these cold winter days, to have a new challenge.

Love,

Grandma Judy