Eerst dag van mijn taalcurses

I went to my first Dutch language course today. Although I've been intensively self-studying for the past three month in Canada nothing prepares you for the many different accents, dialects and the speed of conversation once in the thick of things. I find that my brain needs an extra second to process what someone has just said but most of the time this pause prompts the speaker to say the phrase again but in a different way (and then I'm trying to figure out two phases instead of one) or they flip to English, which is useful at the time but not helpful when trying to learn Dutch. I feel thirteen-years-old again as I bumble through the day of embarrassing moments and slipups in the language (On one of the first nights we were out, I tried to tell one of Pdot's friends my name but instead told him that I loved him). This does not seem to be something that I am experiencing alone, however.

Today when I was trolling through a forum on the website http://www.expatica.com/ (dedicated to providing news and information for an international community), I came upon an article written in March 04th, 2009 concerning the new Dutch publicity campaign to have everyone living in the Netherlands for significant periods of time, be able to communicate in Dutch. The campaign which ran on the TV (I've seen it only once) targets foreigners (the ad used actors of colour and one woman wearing a veil to categorise the "non-speakers") to take on the responsibility of learning the Dutch language and I assume after that to feel/be more integrated into the Dutch community. What is most remarkable however, is the number of responses this article received from the expat community. 102 reactions in total have been logged, the most recent being posted on the 15th of September. For any one forum throughout the whole of the internet I think this is quite a sizable number. The popularity of this piece prompted the site to write a couple of more articles on the subject. When looking through the reactions the views are usually polarised between two camps: those who support the campaign or believe all immigrants should learn the native language of a country that they're moving to. In the other camp, although many saw the usefulness of learning the Dutch language while living in the Netherlands, they disagreed with process (or blame) being laid solely on the shoulders of the migrants.

I agree that learning the Dutch language is tough because it is a Germanic language and very different from English in its structure. As was also reiterated in some of the posts, finding a Dutch course right for myself was indeed very hard. There is however no excuses for lacking opportunities to practice as Dutch Is Everywhere!

From my own and others' experiences, it appears that the Dutch language and individuals' abilities (and inabilities) and apparent effort at trying to learn the language is a meeting point for debate amongst many different communities living here in the Netherlands. I just hope that I'll one day be able to use the classic language-course phrase: "De kaas is oud en beschimmeld" or "the cheese is old and mouldy."