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Eighty eight wonderful canals

Leuven Travel Blog › entry 7 of 35 › view all entries

Living in Brussels we are at the centre of an iron web stretching across continents. Every day I roll along the rails to work in Leuven, and when it comes time to travel the parallel bars run to London, Paris, Amsterdam and beyond. And every now and again we have a day to spend exploring our new city.

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Eighty eight wonderful canals

July 23, 2009

Even though we have moved from Flemish-speaking Leuven to French-speaking Brussels I am spending a lot more time learning Flemish now. I am practicing with conversation CDs and flashcards and am getting much better at reading in Flemish. Speaking Flemish remains an enormous hurdle, as my pronunciation is so appalling that I just get blank looks, and writing in Flemish is an impossibility as my brain keeps on writing Dutch words with English phonetics. It will be a long time before I will be able to say I saw eighty eight wonderful canals in Dutch (“achtentachtig prachtige grachten” is a tounge-twister for even native Dutch speakers).

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ik-ben-10eke says:

The 88 canals are easy to pronounce, but as lamadude said, the koetsier poetst de postkoets is much easier in typing than in pronounciation...

Succes with the conversation lessons :)

Posted on: Jul 29, 2009

lamadude says:

Good luck with studying Flemish!

That sound file is a verrrry hollandic pronounciation of the g sound. It would have sounded a lot softer in Flemish. I made a sound file http://tinyurl.com/l4o5ql of how I would pronounce it (yes I do have too much free time ;-)
It's not really hard to pronounce, it does sound funny though :-) A classic tongue-twister is "de koetsier poetst de postkoets" (the wagonner cleans the stage coach) which I find very hard to say when speaking fast :-)

Posted on: Jul 23, 2009

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