Dutch Language Training - Random Walks in the Low Countries

Group membership and speaking Dutch

March 31, 2009 by Dave Hampton

On a recent episode of the BBC Radio podcast From Our Own Correspondent (Oct 31 2008), Henri Astier discussed the tensions between Dutch and French speakers in the Flemish region surrounding Brussels. Its a short segment and worth a listen if you’ve ever wondered how the whole language partition / cooperation thing works in Belgium. Honestly, it sounds like the answer is “Not too well”.

Mr. Astier also commented on the almost supernatural gift that the Dutch seem to have with speaking other languages. He notes that there is nowhere else on earth where a group of people will switch out of their native tongue in order to accommodate the only non-fluent speaker in the room. It can be a bit eerie: the Dutch will effortlessly switch languages in mid-conversation, swinging as a group into Dutch for a sidebar or a joke that won’t translate, then, without any apparent cue, back into English again.

I think this is extraordinarily polite, and I’ve always appreciated the courtesy. Even though my colleagues rationalize that few people speak Dutch, that Dutch is hard to learn, or that they’ve had to learn English to get along in the world, it’s not something that they have to do in their own country. Most people in other countries don’t.

There may also be secondary advantages for the native Dutch. The limited scope for the language cements the Dutch community together, promoting a Netherlands heritage and building an identity. It gives them a way to talk more familiarly and privately in mixed groups. It serves to instantly distinguish visitors from native- and permanent-residents. Sometimes I wonder if the maxim that “Dutch is hard to learn” is partly a canard, a way to discourage casual membership in the Netherlands group.

Of course, on the days that I’m actually working to learn Dutch, I am a true believer that it is, indeed, hard.

Image credit arnhem.nl

Curb the dogs, please…

November 29, 2007 by Dave Hampton

This has been one of those weeks; back from Thanksgiving week, and immediately into a spin with work, evening meetings and activities, struggles to get out of bed in the morning, struggles to fall asleep at night. No airport lounge or comfortable seat makes a nine hour time difference easy (I’m avoiding Melatonin this time around).

Conversational Dutch was hopeless last night: my head just wasn’t into it and my ears and mouth wouldn’t come together. It’s a bit like the "Wednesday lows" with the nuns in Vught. After a few days of language immersion, your brain goes into vapor lock: they ask a simple question, and you go through the mental steps of parsing the question, finding the verb at the end of the sentence, deciding an answer, finding the vocabulary, checking the verbs, ordering the time-manner-place, checking the pronunciation, oh, and what was the question again…? By Thursday, you’re over it, but there is a point where your mind can’t hold it all any more.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about 🙂

It’s the Dutch and their dogs.

The Dutch are an delightfully orderly, logical, and tidy group. Their stores are clean, well lit, easy to navigate. Their homes are warm, full of art and books, flowers on the table, conversation at the ready. They are precise in arriving at work, leaving work, doing a job right, and keeping a good balance in life. They dote on their children.

But for some reason, they are absolutely unable to clean up after their dogs.

Invariably, on a night when I’m tired and late, I hit one of the many deposits left on sidewalks, curbs, and edging. I don’t realize it until I’m in the apartment and get the lights on, so when I turn around, there’s a nice brown heel-trail following up the stairs, around the foyer, and to the kitchen. I brought American spray carpet cleaner, but it’s an hour of squirt, scrub, wait, vacuum.

My Dutch friends have assured me that attitudes are changing, and people are becoming more aware that they should clean up after their pets. It’s still a surprising omission of Dutch etiquette, especially in light of the pride that they otherwise take in their homes and neighborhoods. And change, in this example, can’t come too soon…

Regina Coeli: the Nuns in Vught

November 28, 2007 by Dave Hampton

Every bit of advice that I get says that the Dutch give you about two years to learn the language; after that, why bother to make the effort of speaking English if you won’t make the effort to learn Dutch? As the expatriates drain out of my corporate division here, there is definitely a reversion towards using Dutch in meetings and casual conversation. I feel like I get about a quarter of the words directly, and can infer about half of what is going on, gaining a bit each week.

‘Still, it’s hard to get up in the morning and keep the commitment to reading De Gelderlander, or to listening to Dutch radio in the car driving to work, or to Laura Speaks Dutch podcasts in the evening, a grammar book on the exercise bike, or to flashcards using VTrain and a session with Rosetta Stone in the evenings (now available online).

You get the idea… So immersion makes a lot of sense for me. Regina Coeli, the legendary “Nuns from Vught” is a good solution. The week costs about 3000 euro’s, not too bad compared to 500 euros for ten two-hour group-conversational sessions at the local language school. For the cost, you get very high-quality, individual, 13-hour-a-day, five-day immersion. No shortcuts, no English: just solid Dutch conversation, grammar, and vocabulary training. The common course is two weeks, one week, followed by a break of a month, then another. The waiting list is six months long, so you should anticipate your needs early for your assignment.

The day goes from 8 am to 9 pm, consisting of alternating hours: individual conversation with a teacher, then language lab practice using books and exercises, then back to a teacher. Lunch and dinner includes “Taaltafels”, and there are individual study breaks and group sessions with games and role playing. Instructors vary from demanding conversationalists to relaxed grammarians to encouraging mentors. (Somehow, I always got the demanding conversationalist at 9 am). Beginners use a series of exercises in a workbook featuring the exploits of Rob and Mariolein; advanced students have more traditional paragraph-level reading and writing. I was able to go through the workbook at about 1 1/2 chapters per day, two weeks easily finished the 10 chapters.

I thought that the experience was extremely effective: I could read a newspaper and hold a simple conversation to check out of a store or into a restaurant after one week. The instructors were first-rate and there is constant feedback on how you are doing. My pronounciation and grammar were very good coming out of the course, but you will need to continue to develop vocabulary and an ‘ear’ for parsing words in spoken Dutch (which always seems run-together to me). It’s hard to find good follow-up, though: you can lose what you learned very quickly if you don’t put it to use, and simple conversations with clerks and colleagues don’t help much. I signed up for a conversational course here in town (I’m headed there now), but it is at a lower level and not as effective. Still, it forces me to keep developing, which is what the Dutch expect to see and appreciate.

And, no, the actual nuns left long ago…

Impacts of Language

November 27, 2007 by Dave Hampton

Even though I’m not much good with learning languages, I believe that learning Dutch is a valuable path to joining the people and culture here. The Dutch are nice about it, saying that it’s a tough language and that everyone speaks English (actually, the language is very straightforward and there are many times that I get caught in situations where little English is spoken)

So, I’ve put effort into it, spending two separate weeks with at the talen instituut Regina Coeli in Vught: a wonderful, intense experience in language immersion. I never learned so much so fast.

Nuns in Vught

The difficulty now comes from two directions. My Dutch is improving, but still fairly elementary, so I’m limited to conversations at about the second grade level. The Dutch people’s English is much better, but we still talk at maybe the high school level. We both try to communicate clearly and slowly, avoiding misunderstanding. It isn’t baby talk, but I am aware that we both ‘dumb down’ the language by avoiding big words, colloquialisms, catch phrases, technical terms, metaphors, and other subtleties.

In the end, isn’t our personal ability to express and understand diminished by this? Do we actually lose fluency by always choosing only the easiest word and safest phrase to communicate thoughts? Over time, do we lose more? Remeber, Orwell said that if you can’t express it, you can’t think it…

Then there is the remarkable discovery by Juan Manuel Toro et al., who demonstrated that “rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards”, earning them the 2007 IgNobel prize for linguistics.

Maybe the rats just didn’t care — we all develop a skill for tuning things out now and then…