When traveling to Amsterdam, attend to the locals’ accents
I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch. This is the ritual: I attempt to frame an elementary Dutch sentence, I get tangled up somewhere around the second clause, and a friendly Dutch person swoops in with flawless English and rescues me. It has happened dozens of times, in shops and cafés and train stations, and I have always assumed the problem was simple.
- ▪I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch.
- ▪This is the ritual: I attempt to frame an elementary Dutch sentence, I get tangled up somewhere around the second clause, and a friendly Dutch person swoops in with flawless English and rescues me.
- ▪It has happened dozens of times, in shops and cafés and train stations, and I have always assumed the problem was simple.
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I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch. Recommended Stories Inside Scoop: Data center debate, empathy gone wild, Talarico’s woke past Inside Scoop: Working-class zeros, Courting Disaster, Nevada’s big gamble Socialist primary wins could complicate Jeffries’ path to the speaker’s gavel I actually know some of the language — I lived in the Netherlands as a child, in Eindhoven, down in the south, and I learned the language the way a 10-year-old learns anything, which is on the hockey team, from other 10-year-olds calling each other disgusting names or giggling at bodily functions and parts.
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