One website describes it this way: [Flemish] Dutch is "A strange language spoken in Flanders and consisting largely of the consonants v,s,c,h,r and k. Dutch is surprisingly easy to learn. Simply fill your mouth with crisps and then speak English and German simultaneously without breathing."
Another friend describes it as English spoken backwards and underwater. And possibly upside down. I agree, because sometimes I feel like if I accidentally hit my head in the right place, I could understand Dutch completely (don't worry, I'm not trying that hard).
Actually, I'm not alone in my thinking: English borrows many words from Dutch, such as "pickle" and the much funnier "gherkin" (where were the Poles with this one?). Umm....there are more, I just wanted to include that because of "gherkin".
I have another theory: Dutch is English spoken by lolcatz.
Question:
Dutch/lolcat answer (from a sign I saw at my bank): "Wij helpen u!"
Unlike American expats, Dutch speakers (or at least some of them) take their language quite seriously. Almost as bad as in France, language is politics is this part of the world: in het Groene Boekje (you guessed it, "the green book"), Dutch and Flemish people battle it out for how things should be spelled in nederlands. An example of one of the changes made in the last edition, published every 10 years: anti-Amerikanisme is now antiamerikanisme.
Should I be worried (after all, "Yankee" is also Dutch in origin)? Nah, I think I'll be alright, as long as I start my Dutch lessons soon and stop cracking up at street signs...
2 comments:
Dutch is one of the harder languages to learn, from what I've heard from others. And when I first moved here I do remember thinking that Dutch sounded like trying to speak English, French and German while gargling.
But I've been here nearly two years now and I sort of like hearing Flemish now (not Holland Dutch...that sounds ugly to me). Much more than I like hearing French.
And there are a few very justified reasons that the Dutch speaking Belgians are so defensive about their language. One of which is that, for years they were forbidden to speak it anywhere but at home by the Francophone government in Belgium. My fiancè's grandparents were whipped in school if they tried to speak Dutch in the school yard.
lilac, that's an interesting point. I asked a Flemish friend about it and ended up getting into a long discussion about how some Flemish radicals were more or less on the side of the Germans during WWI in hopes that they would change the administrative/university language...
What have you been doing to learn Dutch? I'm struggling with it because even though I can understand some things, I won't be kicked in the ass to learn it (like I have in other places I visited or lived where people don't speak much English).
Post a Comment