Frisian 1.1

A goeie! That’s ‘hello’ in Frisian. As a greeting, ‘a goeie’ is one of the first things you are going to learn in this beginner’s part of the Frisian course. The first three weeks are designed to provide you with the language skills equivalent to the CEFR A1 level. You also learn the most conspicuous peculiarities of life in Friesland.

Consecutively, you may continue to develop A2 levels, thus completing the beginner’s programme. Then the course continues with B1 and B2 level skills.

What can you expect in the course of the coming weeks?

There will be a lot of listening at first. Understanding is the main goal in the first weeks. You will also be asked to remember and reproduce words and phrases and produce some simples sentences yourself. Not much reading and writing in the first weeks, though. The acquisition of those faculties is postponed a bit, to let you develop a pronunciation based on spoken Frisian rather than developing a ‘spelling pronunciation’.

Whom can you expect to meet during the course? Since you will often be invited to comment on lessons and to put your answers, writings and ideas in the comment sections below the lessons, you are likely to meet other participants with whom you can practice Frisian, if you like. At least, you can and will learn from each other.

Furthermore, you will meet some of the staff of the Frisian department of Groningen University.

The three teachers you will encounter most often are:

Ms. Gerbrich de Jong – who works as a teacher of Frisian for both Groningen University and NHL Stenden University. She specialises in teaching language training and didactics.
Mr. Henk Wolf – who works as a teacher of Frisian at Groningen University and as a researcher for the Oldenburgische Landschaft. His specialism is teaching and researching in the field of syntax. He is the co-ordinator of this course.
Mr. Martijn Kingma – our teaching assistant, who studies in the Frisian track of the Bachelor programma ‘Minorities and Multilingualism’.

Three other teachers that you might encounter are:

Prof. Goffe Jensma, the head of the Frisian department, who specialises in the history and literature of Friesland.
Dr. Willem Visser, a specialist in linguistics, especially in the field of Frisian phonology. He works for both Groningen University and the Fryske Akademy.
Anne Popkema, our specialist in Old Frisian, who works for Groningen University and for Dingtiid, the governmental advisory board for the Frisian language.

We hope you will enjoy participating in the course. If you should have any questions that you do not want to post on this website, please contact Henk Wolf at h.a.y.wolf@rug.nl.