Practicing Dutch – Blind Leading the Blind
This cartoon first appeared in DUTCH:The Magazine
Stuart
Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.
Very first sentence to learn if you want to learn to speak Dutch: “Spreek alstublieft Nederlands met me.”
I must confess that the very first sentence I learned was: “Sorry. Ik spreek geen Nederlands.” I don’t use that any more of course :)
wat joe zeg
hehe ;). Another hard one is to realize your Dutch partner probably isn’t the best person to teach you, either. Unless they like language and grammar and all that fun stuff (mine most certainly does not).
I had a lot of success with SamenSpraak here in The Hague, also available in other cities. At least in the case of The Hague you are paired with a language coach for a year, meeting however much you want (once a week, every other week). Although we officially “ended” after a year I still see my language coach on a regular basis more than 5 years later.
And libraries. Libraries rule! (Ahem. as a librarian I might be a tad biased…)
My wife is a Dutch and a teacher. She’s not specifically a teacher of the Dutch language (she teaches primary school children) but she’s still very good at teaching me Dutch… I just need to be a better student XD
Ssttt! ;-)