Mastering Afrikaans

After my last trip to South Africa, I came back with an uncomfortable realization: Afrikaans is dying.

Not disappearing exactly—people still speak it. But what they speak is increasingly a hybrid called "mengles," a portmanteau of "meng" (Afrikaans for "mix") and "Engels" (Afrikaans for "English"). It's code-switching taken to its logical conclusion: sentences that start in Afrikaans, detour through English for any word that requires effort to recall, and finish in whatever language happens to be convenient.

I get it. Language evolution is natural. English itself is a mongrel tongue. But there's something different about watching a language you grew up with dissolve in real-time, word by word, into something your grandparents wouldn't recognize.

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Where Pure Afrikaans Still Lives

Here's what I noticed on this trip: there's one corner of South African society where full, unmodified Afrikaans survives. The church.

Church services. Church radio. And most importantly, the Bible itself.

This makes sense when you think about it. Religious contexts resist linguistic drift for the same reasons they resist other kinds of change—tradition, formality, the weight of written text that doesn't update itself. The Afrikaans Bible was translated with care and precision, and nobody's going to revise it to accommodate the fact that people have forgotten the word for "righteousness."

So if you want to hear Afrikaans the way it was meant to be spoken—complete sentences, full vocabulary, proper grammar—tune into RSG (Radio Sonder Grense) on a Sunday morning, or pick up a copy of the Bybel.

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The Decision

Which is exactly what I did. On my way back through Newark last week, I picked up a South African Bible. My plan: fight the battle against broken Afrikaans by learning to speak it, and read it, fully.

I'm not starting from zero—I grew up hearing Afrikaans, can understand most of it, and can stumble through a conversation. But there's a difference between comprehension and fluency, between recognizing words and being able to produce them. The Bible gives me source material that's challenging (formal, archaic vocabulary), meaningful (I actually care about the content), and abundant (it's not like I'm going to run out of chapters).

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The Workflow

After a few weeks of experimentation, I've landed on a process that works:

Step 1: Capture

I take a photo of the full page on my iPhone. Nothing fancy—just good lighting and a steady hand. The text needs to be legible enough for the next step.

Step 2: Deep Translation with Claude

This is where the real learning happens. I upload the photo to Claude and ask for a specific kind of analysis:

• Word-by-word translation: Every single word, including particles and conjunctions I might gloss over
• Sentence-by-sentence translation: The literal meaning of each complete thought
• Paragraph meaning and tone: What's the passage actually communicating? What's the emotional register?
• English equivalents across formality levels: How would you say the same thing formally in English? Informally? In everyday conversation?
• Conversational Afrikaans comparison: How would a native speaker express this same idea in day-to-day speech (as opposed to biblical language)?

This last part is crucial. Biblical Afrikaans is beautiful but nobody talks like that. Understanding the gap between formal written Afrikaans and spoken Afrikaans helps me triangulate toward actual fluency rather than sounding like I'm delivering a sermon every time I open my mouth.

Step 3: Pronunciation with Google Translate

For each line, I paste the Afrikaans text into the Google Translate app and use the text-to-speech feature to hear it pronounced.

Important caveat: the pronunciation is excellent. The translation is not. Google Translate's Afrikaans output is mediocre at best—which is actually another data point about how the language is dying. There isn't enough high-quality parallel text for the models to train on properly.

So I use Google Translate as a pronunciation guide and ignore everything else it tells me.

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Why This Approach Works

A few things come together here:

Reading comprehension and listening in parallel. I'm not just seeing the words; I'm hearing them. This builds the connection between written and spoken Afrikaans that pure reading can't provide.

Linguistic context, not just translation. Claude doesn't just tell me what a word means—it tells me how the word functions, what register it belongs to, how a native speaker would use it. This is the difference between memorizing vocabulary and understanding a language.

Source material that matters. I could read Afrikaans news articles or children's books, but neither would hold my attention the way this does. The Bible is dense, challenging, and worth re-reading. It's also culturally significant to the Afrikaans-speaking community in a way that makes the language feel alive rather than academic.

Building intuition for grammar. By seeing the same grammatical structures repeated across different verses and chapters, patterns start to emerge. Word order. Verb conjugation. How Afrikaans handles tense differently than English. You can't learn this from a grammar textbook the way you can from immersion in actual text.

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The Bigger Picture

I'm under no illusion that my reading a Bible in Newark is going to save Afrikaans. Languages die when their speakers stop using them, and that's a cultural shift that no individual can reverse.

But there's something to be said for personal preservation. For keeping a connection to a language that shaped how my family thought and spoke for generations. For being able to read texts that were written in Afrikaans and meant to be read in Afrikaans, not filtered through translation.

And maybe—if I get good enough—for being one of the people who can still speak it properly when someone needs to hear it.

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Last updated: December 30, 2025