Ik begrijp het niet...

It's been approximately 20 years since I took on the challenge of learning a new language (the high school Latin and university Ojibwe classes don't count, seeing as one of those languages is dead and the other I never heard spoken outside my classroom), and I had forgotten how hard it really is. In the French classes of my grade school, at least the teacher spoke slowly and with a poor accent; here in the Netherlands, everyone's words are a blur of guttural g's and ch's and strange-sounding vowels. I can barely read the Dutch subtitles flashing across the screen when the TV show is an English one, let alone figure out which Dutch word means what. I've learned that German shows are even worse, as the spoken words in German are suspiciously similar to the written Dutch ones, and this conspires to create some nasty habits in my already-laughable pronunciation -- ich bin ein Berliner, anyone?

According to my gracious hosts, my Dutch is improving every day, but to me some days feel like I'm sliding backwards. It's true that I already have a vocabulary of a few hundred words, though only a handful of them naturally fly off my tongue ("please'' and ''thank you'' being the ones I can recite in my sleep), it's true that I can make up short Dick and Jane sentences at will and usually to the laughter of those around me, it's true that Dutch is very much like English and I'm constantly surprised to ask "what's the word for...?" and hear that it's pretty much exactly the same as the English one, tongue-tying pronunciation aside. I can read bus-stop ads and newspaper headlines and street signs and get the gist of what they mean, but it's the everyday conversation that's the killer. How can these words on paper sound so different when they're spoken aloud? How can I never get the accent on the right syllable when I try a word for the first time? And how can I not remember that "ij" is ah-ee and "ui" is ehh with your lips pursed as in oo, and g is hchch like you're clearing your throat except when before n or in some arbitrary word when it's actually pronounced as an English hard g? Getting these sounds to be second-nature is proving to be the hardest part of learning to speak Dutch and there are times I despair that I will always sound like an English-speaking person mangling this new language, never a truly native speaker.

All angst-ridden prose aside, I am enjoying it here quite a bit and even the daily language grind is fun because the Dutch are wonderfully adaptable and accepting people. So many of the English-like words in Dutch are there because they really are English words, adapted into Dutch over the years. There's none of the chest-thumping "courriel" versus "e-mail"debate as in France, or constant dubbing of foreign TV shows and movies like in Germany. The time and energy spent by other countries protecting and glorifying their language is simply spent speaking and living it here in the Netherlands. And from what I can see, it's a popular and thriving language, spoken by people who would rather look outwards to the rest of the world than inwards at themselves. I think this attitude shows why such a tiny country has survived as it has, through wars and floods and ever-changing world powers. The people just go with it, and get on with it. I had always wondered why Den Haag was the seat for all things international in the world, and why Maastricht was the place that the treaty for the European Council was created. But now I know.