When I first came to the Netherlands, I knew a little Dutch because I’d learnt some at university, where I first met my wife (then girlfriend). So, I had a bit of time to prepare and get the basics right. I like learning languages and I find the first few steps to be the easiest. My challenge mostly comes from consistency and continuing to apply myself to learning every day. Daily habits are crucial, and this is especially true for learning new skills, like a language.

I lived in Leiden and worked in the Bijlmer at first and so I had a good one-hour commute to work and back each day, and I used this to learn Dutch. Later, I would take more formal Dutch classes too, but initially I did everything in that commute: I listened to tapes, read books and practiced my conversation.

Um-ing and ah-ing

I also learnt quite early on what words you need to say in Dutch to keep a conversation going without actually saying much. Linguists call these ‘filler words’. You can find them out easily enough by listening to the person in a conversation who’s doing the listening and see what they say. If you can speak these words, you can keep a conversation going for a long time without anyone ever discovering that you don’t actually have a clue what they’re talking about. If you’re smart you’ll keep your ears wide open and learn a lot of new words and how to pronounce things in your new language. I did this with (mostly old) people on the train. You could have a half-an-hour’s “conversation” without ever saying much of import, and at the end your speaking partner would be stunned that you weren’t not Dutch, because “you speak it so well”. It turns out that people’s memory of a conversation is rarely your memory of the conversation.

Stubborn, stubborner, stubbornest

As I got better, I found it really useful to actually speak Dutch with real Dutch people. This is a lot trickier than it sounds. Holland has one of the best levels of English-speaking for a country which does not have a dialect of English as its native language, globally. The Dutch love to speak English. As an example, if I were French, German, Turkish, Polish or Vietnamese, I couldn’t stop half way through a Dutch-language meeting and say “I’m sorry, I’m really tired, please can we continue this in my mother tongue?” (I chose those languages because I’m betting that for at least a couple of them, Dutch people will actually have some level of fluency: they really could continue if they wanted. The Dutch love learning languages too, so it’s not just that they speak English well. Often they speak a couple of other languages well too). Yet in English that works just fine, every single time. If I speak just a few words of English, the whole conversation switches over to English. And it’s not just in meetings: everywhere you go Dutch people will speak English to you without a moment’s hesitation. If they work out you’re English. A lot of my expat friends have this common refrain: “I can’t learn Dutch because everyone speaks English to me”. My answer, when I was starting learning Dutch, was very simple: I was extremely stubborn.

Rather than stopping speaking Dutch when people spoke English to me, I would continue the conversation in Dutch, against all odds. I would continue talking in Dutch even when it was clear that my conversational partner’s English was better than my Dutch. I would continue talking in Dutch even when I didn’t really know the words. I would continue talking in Dutch come what may. Sometimes, the people I was talking to wouldn’t take ‘nee’ for an answer, so I tried subterfuge. For instance, I would claim I was Norwegian or some other, vaguely plausible nationality whose language I would hope to goodness they didn’t speak (a big white guy passes for a lot of interesting nationalities I’ve found, but Outer Mongolian is not one of them, sadly). I would ask if they could speak Norwegian, apologise that my English was so poor and then continue in Dutch. No problems whatsoever.