A in NL w/ Humpty Dumpty etc.

I am trying to learn a language that is simultaneously intuitive and counter-intuitive. Funny to note how your previous languages determine the way you learn a new one. Entertaining, too...
A few notes:

• I am taking a crush course which is called Dutch for Absolute Beginners by the Department of Dutch as Second Language (not foreign language!). I don't think the name of the course is misleading, but even a more appropriate one would be "Dutch as third language". It is mostly building on
  
• a) your listening and remembering abilities (which doesn't work with my "structure first!" understanding -comes from my Turkish heritage of course, I am not sure why, but knowing /learning a language is such a mythical issue, assumed to be soooo difficult there that it almost blocks one. So you should start with the grammer first. Because Turkish is so different. It isn't.)
  
• b) your abilities of other languages (particularly German but also English, that for instance doesn't make life too easy for French speakers!) It feels good to have studied German for a change, as I can never meet Germans whose English is not better than my German. Yet, I obviously remember the grammar fine!

• Dutch makes your imagination go wild: I have been fantasising that I was walking from Germany to England and on the way I was stuck somewhere where everything sounds familiar, but is both pronounced and spelt wrongly! Some kind of Alice situation, in particular the Humpty Dumpty bit, because it is not only the pronounciation and spelling that is shifting with the geography but also the meaning! Uh oh! (Well, starting to read Alice this time in Dutch so it may be normal)
  
• I noticed how much I miss learning a language. I think I lost it between Japanese and Arabic, as I was trying to find my way around those 4 new alphabets at once. It was a bad idea, I know... But what else should I do in a snow-county for 6 months?! Learn skiing?! ;) Much better to try to memorise 3 different ways of writing each letter in a warm classroom. It was my laziness I do admit that made me try those at once.
• Every language has its fun stuff. My fave today (although yesterday I had others) is the Dutch to ask the time in a "how late is...?" format. As a result, you also have to make use of your maths skills to tell the time: you have to figure how late it is! For instance you have construct time around "five past half ten", which I suspect means 9.35 but I might be completely wrong. Sander can tell me tomorrow that it actually means 10.25, and I wouldn't mind. The way to learn it seems to be forgetting whatever you know about telling time. As Erkut says (more likely that used to say) "time is irrelevant!" :)

So I'm enjoying myself, and frantically reading in the afternoons to make up for the work I am missing. Apologies for being out of contact every now and then...