“Wat is dat?” asked my girlfriend’s three year old cousin as she pointed to the image of a brightly coloured sheep.
“Het is een schaap.” I informed her.
We were sitting on the sofa of her parent’s cabin as she proudly showed me her new story book and inquisitively asked me the names of all the animals within.
“En wat is dat?” She asked pointing to another smiling animal.
I didn’t know the answer so I tried to cover by telling her the English name. “Er… het is een duck.”
She responded by looked at me with the kind of confusion only a three year olds can pull off, the kind where they just stare at you in the vain hope that you will make sense and stop being strange.
She quickly realize that I probably would not be making sense anytime soon so she decided to correct me instead, “Het is een eend,” and then point to another animal, “wat is dat?”
“Ik weet het niet.” I confessed this time, deciding to go for the honest approach.
“Het is een koe.” She informed me like a teacher correcting her student.
And then, since questions about farm yard livestock seemed to be too complex she continued to identify them for me;
“En dit is een konijn.”
It was while she pointed to each animal that I realized…
“En dit is een geit.”
…she was no longer doing for her own amusement or benefit…
“En dit is een haan”
…it was for mine.
“En dit is een varken.”
This is how I ended up being taught Dutch by a three year old.
During my time in Holland I have taken a few Dutch courses in an attempt to learn the local language. During one of these courses the teacher decided it would be fun for the class to play scrabble. Obviously playing scrabble in English would not have been very educational so we were required to play the game in Dutch.
Trying to learn a new language is already very difficult at the best of times but trying to come up with words you don’t know from a new language you don’t know while using a random selection of letters seemed almost impossible.
However, when we started the game I somehow managed to identify a Dutch word hidden within my random assortment of letters. Unfortunately for me it was not a word I felt very comfortable putting down.
During my first couple of turns I tried to ignore it in the hope that a better word would come up but as I accumulated more letters it was still the only word I could identify. When the Dutch teacher started to insist that I must have a word “by now” I decided there was nothing for it but to put the word down.
H-o-e-r
The teacher (who was female) paused. A few students sniggered.
“Can you say the word?” The teacher asked a few seconds later, trying to keep it educational.
“Umm… Hoer.” I had to answer embarrassingly.
“And do you know what it means in English?” She asked.
There was another awkward pause and some more giggles.
My brain could have picked any manner of politically correct ways of describing the words meaning but it had decided that I was on my own and the first thing that jumped out of my mouth was, “whore?”
Damn you brain.
“Prostitute! I mean prostitute!” I quickly corrected myself before it sounded like I was calling the teacher names.
Another awkward pause. More giggling.
Without saying a word the teacher took a look at the other letters I had available. “You can make it into a different word you know.” She informed me after some thought.
“Oh.” I expressed as I looked at my letters and tried to see it for myself or any other word that would get me out of this embarrassing situation before I permanently labeled myself as the guy with the one track mind.
After a few more awkward moments she decided to put me out of my misery and show me by putting the letters down herself.
H-o-e-r-e-n
(A group of prostitutes)
“It’s a higher letter score.” She informed me.
Later I realized I could have put down horen (meaning to hear something) but she was right. It was not worth as much as a group of prostitutes.
During the summer holidays my parents and my girlfriend’s parents met for the very first time. We had arranged to spend the weekend with my girlfriend’s parents while my parents were visiting us in Holland. This might sound like the plot of a sitcom waiting to happen but once we had convinced my father that he really did not need to wear a suit to meet her parents (and make us look any more English then we already are) everything was fine. My parents and her parents got along very well and it was very gezellig.
To mark the occasion my girlfriend and myself decided to cook a traditional English meal of Indian curry for us all to enjoy.
We started to prepare the meal by cutting the vegetables and arranging the ingredients we would require. Both our parents sat at the nearby table, chatting with each other and occasionally watching us as we demonstrated our culinary skills.
As my girlfriend put the ingredients into the wok and stirred them I concentrated very hard upon my vegetable chopping duties to avoid adding to my collection of kitchen knife related accident finger scars. This must have given me the focused appearance of someone who takes cooking very seriously because my girlfriend’s mother smiled as she watched my careful slicing and dicing of a yellow pepper. She then slowly turned to look at my parents and with the same smile upon her face announced to them in her Dutch accent, “Stuart is turning into a real cock.”
A cock?!
There was a pause. I stopped mid-chop, my girlfriend stopped mid-stir and my parents stopped mid-being-English. We all looked at each other.
A cock?!
“Mum!” My girlfriend suddenly broke the silence, barely able to keep a straight face. “You just called my boyfriend a Pimol!”
“What?! Nee, nee, nee. Dat was niet mijn bedoeling!” Her mother tried to frantically correct the mistake.
It was too late; with the silence broken we had already burst out laughing loudly and uncontrollably and were unable to stop. After we all regained the ability to breathe and wiped the tears from our eyes some time later we explained to her that the word she had been looking for was ‘cook’… At least I hope it was.
As someone who is learning to speak Dutch I have learned to accept that there will be times when my attempts to speak the language will not go quite as I had plan and that there are other times when it will ‘really’ not go as I had plan. One such example happened recently during a dinner party my girlfriend and I were hosting for two friends, Marjolein and Marije. During the dinner we spoke Dutch and I like to think I did a fairly good job of keeping up with the conversation and taking part. However… After dinner I made an unplanned slip up which I am constantly reminded about.
After I had helped my girlfriend take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen she asked me, “Wil je de tafel schoonmaken.”
I understood, nodded to her request to clean the table and walked back into the front room armed with a cleaning cloth.
Upon approaching the table Marjolein informed me, “Ik heb het gedaan.”
I thanked her for informing me that she had already cleaned the table and returned to the kitchen with unused cleaning cloth in hand.
“Dat was snel,” my girlfriend commented upon my quick return to the kitchen.
I grinned happily like a kid about to show off his new Dutch language skills and announced loudly, “Marjolein heb ik gedaan.”
The grin lasted 1.5 seconds and ended around the time my girlfriend suddenly shouted, “What?!”
I quickly ran the words that had just come out of my mouth back through my brain and realized that I had just announced that I had ‘done’ Marjolein.
My attempts to quickly correct my mistake by shouting, “Nee, de tafel, de tafel.” (table) probably added to the imagery by implying that I had done her on the table rather then it being the table that she had ‘done’ (in a non-sexual sense).
“That was quick,” my girlfriend simply repeated again, this time in English with a smirk. The shocked look she had given me upon my false confession had been fake of course because (like I would have done) she was planning to milk my language slip up for its entire comic worth. She followed it with a request to her friends that they stop ‘doing’ her boyfriend.
I have not been allowed to forget this language slip up since and I always have to be careful at dinner parties that I don’t accidentally ‘do’ anyone linguistically.
I have recently noticed a strange phenomenon that accurse during the early stages of an expat’s attempt to learn the language of their host country. I have decided to call this phenomenon, ‘The Unintentional Question Effect’ since it happens when an expat unintentionally adds a rising inflection to the end of a sentence, thus making everything they say sound like a question.
The rising inflection is often added simply because we are questioning if we have said what ever we were trying to say correctly with out committing first degree language murder.
I will use a normal every day activity to better demonstrate this phenomenon:
Imagine that you enter a small café in Amsterdam with a desire to purchase a simple beverage, a coffee for example. You find a suitable seat, maybe one by the window over looking a pleasant view. The waiter approaches you with his order pad and a smile. He greets you in Dutch and you return he’s greeting. This establishes a simple relationship between you, that of customer and beverage supplier. He then asks you what you would like to drink.
“Wat wil je drinken?”
You wish to practise the Dutch you have learnt so you reply that you would like a coffee:
“Ik wil enn koffie?”
The rising inflection you unintentionally add to the end of the statement is simply displaying your unfamiliarity with the language and asking the un-spoken question:
“Did I say that right? Is that how you say that in Dutch?”
However, the waiter does not hear the unspoken question since it is unspoken. He hears a different question that does not make you sound like someone attempting to speak an unfamiliar language. Instead, it makes you sound like someone who has forgotten to take their medication:
“Do you think I would like coffee? Do I look like the kind of person who would like coffee? Do you think I would like tea instead of coffee?”
Shortly after you add that you would like milk? and sugar? the waiter starts to back away to call the local hospital and ask if they are missing any patients.
The same thing can happen in many other situations. Telling a cab driver that you would like to go to the train station might suddenly take on another meaning:
“I’d like to go to the train station? Do you think I will enjoy myself at the train station? Are there many fun activities for a thrill seeker such as myself to take part in at the train station?”
Even a simple statement like, “my name is Stuart,” said in another language by a confused expat can suddenly sound like a puzzled conundrum of confusion posed by a two year old suffering from concussion.
I’ve confused and (probably) scared a lot of Dutch people by introducing myself in such a way but at least all the waiters in Amsterdam seem to agree that I look like more of a tea person then a coffee person.
Categories: 
