Dutch Scrabble – Stories From Dutch Class

In the early years of my quest to learn the Dutch language I took a few different courses at different times (until I discovered it was easier to marry a Dutch person and learn by osmosis). I’ve already shared the story of the first course I took, the one I quit shortly after the teacher (an older man called Hans) started getting us to translate his self-written semi-erotic fiction. It took a few years until I was willing to try learning Dutch again after that but when I did it was via another company run course. This time things had become much more professional (and a lot less sexual) with an someone from an external language school being hired to do the teaching.

Despite the new approach I was still struggling to learn the language. In fact, most of the people in the class were. Morale was low, so the teacher started exploring ways to make learning Dutch more fun. She decided the best way to do this was to get us all to play a game of scrabble… in Dutch.

When you are not fully familiar with a language it can be difficult to do certain things with that language. Having a basic conversation is tricky but not impossible. Writing can be a challenge due to the unfamiliar sentence structure, grammar and spelling. Coming up with a word from a random collection of seven letters (when you know less than five percent of the words in the language) is almost impossible.

The teacher seemed surprised when one by one we skipped our turn or (if we were lucky) came up with the most basic of two letter words. However, after a few rounds I was finally able to identify a word with as many as four letters. This would have been great apart from the fact that it was a word I didn’t feel very comfortable putting on the board.

I tried to ignore it and skipped my turn a few more times. Each time the round came back to me I felt a slight panic. No new words came. Eventually I was the only person who had not put down a word.

“You must have a word by now,” the teacher insisted after watching me struggle with my letters yet again.

There was nothing for it. I was going to have to put down the word I had identified. One by one I placed the tiles on the board.

H-o-e-r

The teacher paused. A few students sniggered.

“Can you say the word?” The teacher asked a few seconds later. I silently commended her and cursed her at the same time for trying to keep it educational.

“Umm… Hoer.” I answered in embarrassment.

“And do you know what it means in English?” She asked.

There was another awkward pause and some more giggles.

My brain could have picked any manner of politically correct ways of describing the words meaning but it had decided that I was on my own and the first thing that jumped out of my mouth was, “whore.”

To be fair it was the literal translation.

“Prostitute! I mean prostitute!” I quickly corrected myself before it sounded like I was calling the teacher names.

Another awkward pause. More giggling.

Without saying a word the teacher took a look at the other letters I had available. “You can make it into a different word you know,” she informed me after some thought.

“Oh.” I expressed as I looked at my letters and tried to see it for myself (or any other word that would get me out of this embarrassing situation before I permanently labeled myself as the guy with the one track mind).

After a few more awkward moments she decided to put me out of my misery and show me by putting two extra letters from my hand on to the end of my word.

H-o-e-r-e-n

“A group of whores. It’s a higher letter score.” She informed me and returned to the rest of the game without missing a beat. It wasn’t quite on par with Hans’ semi-erotic fiction translation but somehow Dutch class had become sexual again.

Later I realized I could have put down horen (meaning to hear something) but she was right. A group of prostitutes is worth more.