Een kleintje spreekt meer nederlands dan ik!

I was sitting in the park yesterday doing my Chinese when my freaky downstairs neighbour (hereafter to be known as "Rosie's Dad") came by.
"Is that Chinese?"
"Yep."
"You can write Chinese?"
"Badly."
"How many languages do you speak?"
"Depends who I'm talking to."
Sounds like I'm being flip and vague again, but that statement was directly motivated by the events of the previous afternoon.

I spent last week boning up on Dutch since kayiwa said there'd be Dutch speakers present. I remember thinking to myself, What kind of Dutch speaker doesn't know English? The answer is, obviously enough, a seven year-old.

Good-natured complaints from the hostess that everyone was gathering in the kitchen and no one was on their fabulous porch encouraged me to play pioneer. Soon I was joined by the nederlandstalige niece and her Arizonan cousin and we began kicking around a soccer ball from our seats. To keep it low-key, I made a no-hands rule which the little girl seized on. I heard her shouting out numbers from time to time, but it took forever for me to realise that she was counting instances of "hands" (pronounced--as with other soccer terms--the English way; this also threw me) with the intent of imposing a penalty at 30.

In fact, her mother had to point this out when she joined us. That's also when the interrogation began. The girl asked me a question I couldn't follow at all. "She wants to know if you have a girlfriend," her mother kindly explained. "Oh, meisje!" I said. Then came the other questions--How old was I? What was my surname? And so forth. She shushed her mother's attempts to translate those, making it clear that this was not merely small talk but a test--and I flunked. She finally commenced behaviour universally recognisable as juvenile mocking. "She says 'You say you speak Dutch and all you know is the words for 'yes' and 'no'."

Guilty as charged. My Dutch is entirely incidental; I learned a few phrases when I visited the country, but mostly I skate by on the resemblance to German. Give me half a minute and I can form a reasonably correct simple sentence and take a stab at pronouncing it. (I warmed up for Saturday by participating in some online chat about literature in Dutch.) But listening comprehension is my worst skill in any language. Plus, kids are the hardest to understand. Often enough, I can't tell what they're trying to say to me in English. In an attempt to save some face, I kept relating to the others present my tale of a conversation with a German youngster near the end of my stay in Germany. My German was basically fluent at that point--I was even occasionally fooling native speakers--but I'll be damned if I understood anything he was trying to tell me.

The kids soon gave up on us and gave kayiwa's SIL and me opportunity for a good long chat. We discovered a common love of Catalan (and a common failure to read La plaça del Diamant to the end), but I didn't try to speak more than a few words of that. Sounding like an idiot in one language is enough for one day. (When niemandsrose pointed out that fear would've kept her from being so bold in a language she didn't really know, I pointed out that the free flow of beer was key.)

Een beetje more about Dutch

Three things bedevil me about Dutch: Details of the pronunciation (I can't do a voiced velar fricative to save my life, and my labiovelar approximant is shaky at best), the word order (so near to German, yet so far), and the false friends. These are all over the damn place. I think I've finally learned to stop reading was as "what" (its meaning in German), but I still haven't wrapped my head around all the uses of al and als, except to know that relying on German usage will almost always lead me up the wrong creek.

Today I found a surprising imposter: kleinkind. In German, it's just what is sounds like: a Kind who is klein. But the Dutch meaning is "grandchild", whereas a German grandchild (Enkel) is, among other things, an ankle. If I want to characterise my younger nephew, the word I need is kleintje ("little" with a diminutive, like the Spanish chiquito).

Und dann gibt es die unerwarteten Entsprechungen. Twee ist "zwei", drie is "drei", and twintig is "zwanzig". So sollte 30 drietig sein, nicht wahr? Keine Chance! Das lautet dertig. Wenn man vom englischen three : thirty ausgeht, hat das etwas Sinn, aber das Englische ist selbst nicht besonders sinnvoll. Ich wusste, dass boven "oben" heisst, also suchte ich nach onden für "unten". Vergebens--das Antonym is aber beneden!

I figure the only way to sort this all out is to plunge in, so I've requested reading recommendations from some Dutch acquaintances. I may need to invest in a new grammar, as my charmingly outdated "Teach Yourself" paperback is literally falling to pieces, but my equally outdated pocket dictionary should be up to the task--supplemented with a solid online dictionary, that is.