Our first day there, we had a tour of the city, led by a little old Dutch lady. She was fabulous, and everyone wanted to take her home and have her be their grandma. She gave good advice - "Don't buy crack off the street, just buy weed" and told stories about hookers (a man who had a heart attack with his regular hooker and she had to call his wife to tell him). And over and over she would tell us, "ja, it is true!" As if we ever doubted her.
Oh yeah, and we actually lost our bus driver at some point because he kept going into the whorehouses. He was a little sketchy.
So the point of the story is that we loved the Dutch. And now I've decided to learn the language.
I bought a Pimsleur audio course thingy which I can listed to in my car. I've done two discs so far, and can say "Spreekt u Engels?" (do you speak english?) and "Ik spreek geen Nederlands" (I don't speak Dutch) So....that's going to get me far.
But what really annoys me about these CDs is that they keep giving me false hope. I have to have fake conversations with Dutch people. It goes something like this:
Pardon mevrouw
--goedemorgen meneer
Spreekt u Engels?
--Ja, ik spreek engels.
And at this point, I get wicked excited, because awesome! Dutch lady speaks English and I can forget this whole speaking in Naderlands thing. But no, that's not what Pimsleur wants me to do.
Ik Amerikaanse (I'm American...like she cares)
--Je spreekt zeer goed Nederlands (You speak very good Dutch...LIES WOMAN. My Dutch is terrible, and I keep spitting.)
Dank u (Thank you. And this is probably my favorite thing to say so far in Dutch, even though it makes me feel like a four year old. It's like English baby talk.)
--Tot ziens meneer. (Good bye sir.)
And that's it. It's pretty fucking fascinating, I know.
But the Puppy Bowl is on now, so I need to focus on watching that. Because it is 8:30 on a Saturday morning and I have nothing better to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment