by Stuart · April 15, 2011
Stuart
Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.
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Yep, guilty as charged! Maybe you should insist on talking Dutch more, dear ;p Be strong! Keep on talking Dutch.. Then, maybe one day your wife will do the same :D hihi…
Hahahah Stu, maybe your wife is right…just saying, lol. BUT to be honest I don’t think I can talk to my Dutch b/f in Dutch either, it would just be so….strange (of course considering I could in the first place). I think we will pursue an alternative language instead when we think it’s time to spice up our conversation methods !!!!
OMG an idea for you on how to stick to speaking Dutch in your relationship. Maybe think of it as an opportunity to spice things up by talking in Dutch however awkward and clumsy it might get !!!
We did manage to switch languages but that was because we initially spoke German and it felt a bit weird to be speaking German once we moved to Holland. Added to that it was neither of our native language so was probably very crap indeed, particularly once we were no longer in a German-speaking environment.
So for us it’s weird to try and hold a conversation in English and husband tends to tune out if the kids and I are speaking English, particularly if we are discussing things like what is the biggest shark in the world and why swimming was invented (just thought of an answer to that one – to swim away from sharks).
I did swtiched to Dutch with my husband. It is not my ideal language but it is okay. I think no other person in the world is so forgiving of my eventual mistakes – which can be a problem. Hubby doesn’t care if I make a fool of myself with the Dutch language. For example: I spent almost one year saying the world bijzonder as “baizonder” instead of “bizonder”. My kids, on the other way, are cruel critics of my errors and mistakes. They point them out immediately and demand correction.
I agree with all of the above, and with you and the wife too :) I have just registered to take the NT2 exam, so I’ll be studying hard for the next three months. Once I’ve got it, I can slide back to my usual English peppered with Dutch gobbledegook:)
The Wife – Yes. Because you really need to improve your Dutch my dear.
Efrutik – I’m not sure if it will spike things up if she can not stop laughing.
Marianne – Sharks? that sounds like the kind of conversation I would want to tune into.
Anita – I used to do that with my wife. I never corrected her English because I could understand her. When she found out I was doing that she asked me to start correcting her.
VallyP – I’ve been doing the English peppered with Dutch thing for a while now as well.