by Stuart · January 4, 2014
How I think I sound when speaking Dutch. How the Dutch think I sound when speaking Dutch. How I actually sound when speaking Dutch.
This cartoon first appeared in the September/October edition of DUTCH:The Magazine, a bi-monthly magazine for Dutch descendants and expats living in Canada.
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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I’m not sure any Nederlander has ever found it “cute” when I speak Dutch. All I get are the corrections. :)
Glad you had a good time at the fair!
I get a lot of corrections too. they just find my mistakes very funnily cute.
“Cute… cute… cute…”
Sure buddy. Just keep that thought ;).
I always do :)
Well done, Stu! That must have been fun at the show, and congratulations on coming third! That’s great!
Thank you very much :)
No one thought it was cute when I asked for a tepel to stir my tea.
The whole place was in hysterics :-)
Yeah. That kind of thing happens to me too.
They say to me that I speak like a Belgium person…From the look on their face,it was not a compliment…
From the Dutch it never is.
I am learning dutch from a three year old, his version of alsjeblieft is sound something like: albeliefd and of course I managed to say it that way in a shop, but somehow i got a different reaction than he does :D
Hehe. That’s extremely funny.
Well, since than I got so surprised when a nice lady in shop sad me DUI instead of DAG, which they usually say around here, that in the middle of saying DAG my brain switched to DUI as a result i managed to say the combination of the two, as a result I said: DIE. I seriously losing my confidence with this language…
I am an Aussie, and when I speak Dutch, the natives roll their eyes and answer in German. Imagine how confused they get when I tell them that I don’t speak it!
Haha. That must get annoying after a while though.
I sometimes feel the same way with the French language. :P
I bet they see it as less cute though… being French.
Dutch the Magazine is also read by Dutch people and their decendents in the USA, like me and my kids living in different places in Texas.
Ugh, so true though…