Why I am trying to learn Dutch when everyone in Amsterdam speaks English

My Dutch teacher helping me read Grimm’s fairy tales in Dutch.

When I first came to live in Amsterdam over twenty years ago I was travelling a great deal for work. My work was managing a multinational non-profit organisation and my work was in English. Buried beneath all this is any British person of my generation’s guilty secret—we’re really bad at learning languages because our language education was so poor.

Now I am self-employed and my work is still in English but it doesn’t feel right to live in a country for so long and not have some understanding of the language everyone is speaking.

A few years back I attended regular Dutch classes in Taalhuis, a learning centre in Amsterdam. They were great classes—lively and lots of fun, even though I was usually the oldest person in the class, and I made good progress. However, then came Covid and everything went online and became much harder and more serious. It was also very expensive and gradually I let go and then gave up. My relationship with the Dutch language went back to being minimal.

I was jolted out of this by the teacher in my art class. She’s a forthright sort of person and berated me for my laziness in living in Amsterdam so long and yet not speaking Dutch. I did squirm with embarrassment but was still fazed by the high costs. However, the art class is organised by our local community centre de Eester and it turned out they could find me a volunteer willing to help me with Dutch.

So then I met Boudewijn, pictured above. He’s the same age as me, a retired teacher of VAT—can you believe it—and we clicked from the first moment we met. I was intrigued by his green glasses and went on to discover that we share an interest in history, a commitment to following the news and both enjoy laughing and being quietly naughty.

Boudewijn thinks I am crazy to torture myself struggling with something I don’t have a natural aptitude for but he enjoys my company and is willing to apply himself to help me in any way he can. He regularly points out that the majority of Dutch people—particularly in Amsterdam—speak perfectly good English and can make myself understood without speaking Dutch. He’s right of course but I see my partner engrossed in a panel discussion, or watching the news and I can’t share more than the most superficial aspects. When we are with friends everyone speaks in English for me but whenever I move out of earshot, they slip back into Dutch because that’s where they’re most comfortable—naturally!

I certainly don’t find it easy but there is a definite sense of joy when I do manage to master a difficult phrase, or some new vocabulary. However I am seeing that struggling with a language brings me up against parts of my conditioning and even my ambition. Boudewijn pointed out recently—and he’s very perceptive—that the reason I get frustrated is because I am impatient with just getting by in Dutch and want to speak it fluently. He’s right—I was educated to succeed and I find it hard to just bumble along. I didn’t know that I had such expectations of myself but it seems I do. It stops me from playing with what I am learning—I get embarrassed when I make a mistake and then dry up. But I am trying to learn—I want to be daring and take risks in speaking Dutch. Most of all, I want to chip away at the ingrained part of me that was moulded as I was steered towards a university education as a child in school. It’s invigorating to work with a habit that I have been unaware of, while stretching my brain around the complexities of the Dutch language.

Are you trying to learn anything new at the moment? How are you finding it for yourself?