Een kleintje spreekt meer nederlands dan ik!

[muckefuck]

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.)

Comments

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Ik wist niet dat je Nederlands zal kunnen spreken?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Als boven gezegt, heb ik het van de beste bron, dat ik het niet spreken kan!

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Little kids always have a way of taking me down a peg in foreign languages, even when they AREN'T mocking me. :)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's like, "Okay, so I don't know enough terminology or grammar to play a simple game--but I can conjugate all the modals and say automatic teller machine! Just give me a chance!"

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but one of my favorite memories of visiting -e's cousins is an afternoon I spent pointing to things and having the kids tell me what they are in Spanish. They were so willing to help, and it gave me a chance to connect with them.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And the best part is that you can do it all again next time you visit!

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. I still cringe about the fieldwork I did on child discourse in ASL -- after I signed for about five minutes with a bunch of five- to seven-year-olds, they politely asked me to give it up and let them read my lips instead :}

[pne.livejournal.com]

mostly I skate by on the resemblance to German.

Sounds like my attempts at Dutch!

I've never had to try my listening comprehension in earnest, but producing Dutch is something like 10% Dutch words and 90% German words inflected and/or pronounced differently in the hope that that'll be decent Dutch.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

One of my linguistics professors (with a thorough knowledge of Germanic historial phonology) used to do this. He told us how, at one point, his hosts politely asked him to please stop and speak English instead!

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

Really? In my experience, most Dutch people find German-derived Dutch rather charming. I know I always smile when I hear Germans say verzoeken when they mean "trying", simply because the German word for "trying" is versuchen. For the record, the corresponding Dutch verb is proberen (which I think also exists in German -- (probieren, right?), and verzoeken means "to request". :-)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Well, I think you had to know my professor...

Yeah, probieren is proper German for "try". I couldn't tell you when I use this and when I prefer versuchen.

BTW, any other tips you have on frequent false friends would be appreciated. I already got busted for saying gewichtig where belangrijk was more fitting.

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

Gewichtig, eh? Heh. That made me smile. Sorry. :-)

I'll have to think about other false friends. The only one I can come up with off the top of my head is not to use gezusters where you'd use Geschwister in German. Dutch gezusters only means "sisters" (and is fairly old-fashioned at that), not siblings in general. "Siblings" would be broers of zussen.

One major grammatical difference between Dutch and German (other than the lack of noun cases and all that) is the lack of worden at the end of passive sentences. In German you'll find sentences such as, ich bin entdeckt worden. In Dutch, you leave out the worden: ik ben ontdekt. That holds true for all passive sentences.

Then, of course, there are the pronunciation false friends: sp, st, sch and eu. Once you get the hang of those, though, Dutch pronunciation really isn't too tricky.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

sch really is a killer; I'm not surprised it's been used as a shibboleth. I don't want to forget the [x], so it usually feels like I'm exaggerrating it horribly. It always sounds so soft from native speakers.

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

Yep, sch is a source of endless fun. More than "Scheveningen" (the example you've probably come across), though, I think schrijven (to write) is the real pronunciation test. Or schreeuwen (to scream). I know few foreigners who can pronounce these words entirely correctly.

What's "[x]"? Does that denote the Dutch G sound?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Sorry, a bit of IPA for ASCII. That's a voiceless velar fricative. Dutch <ch> is a better match, since the Dutch <g> is only voiceless some of the time. Otherwise, it is [G] (in X-SAMPA).