The Dutch Tales #4: Ik spreek Nederlands... of niet?

It has been almost 4 months since I wrote the last article for this blog and yet it feels to me like it was yesterday. Time flies when you're having the time of your life! I have finished all the compulsory classes of my master's (let's ignore the fact that I did not manage to keep a perfect score and still have a resit to do), hence technically the only thing blocking me from a master diploma is this teeny tiny thing called master thesis... But let's not talk about that, this article is supposed to be about nice things. :)

Opening this article with a city that I fell in love with at first sight - Breda

Speaking of nice things (and there has been many over the months), one thing that I would really like to mention here is the carnaval! I'm not gonna lie to you guys, it was intense. But I am proud to announce that I survived my very first carnaval ever! For those of you who have never heard of the Dutch carnaval, let me explain. Basically, the country (or at least parts of it) goes crazy for like 5-6 days in February (yeah it took me long to process it and write about it :)). Every city has its colours and a carnaval nickname - for my beloved Tilburg the name is Kruikenstad and the colours as you might guess from the pictures below are orange and green. There are parties EVERYWHERE, random shops miraculously turn into costume stores and everyone dresses up. For costumes there are no rules except one - the crazier the better! You can see unicorns hanging out with slutty police officers, carrots, pirates, native Americans and a lot of silly onesies. I'm definitely guilty of at least two of the above mentioned! But one thing that is very specific about the carnaval is the music - it's so stupid it actually turns into awesome. Some of the songs were definitely stuck in my brain until half of March. Please enjoy a brief photo documentation of carnaval including the parade below.

Generally speaking, after more than 7 months in The Netherlands, I feel pretty acclimatised here in the lowlands. Actually, there is hardly a day when I don't hear any of my friends say "Katerina, you are so Dutch" - which I deserve mostly because of eating an excessive amount of bread or making a brutally honest comment.

So since I am apparently so Dutch, this semester I decided to get some formal knowledge of the Dutch language! I say formal because I have known something before, but well, knowledge of swearwords, bad rap songs and supermarket Dutch (hoi, alsjeblieft, bonnentje, dankjewel, fijne dag) wasn't gonna get me too far, right? Eight classes deep into 'Dutch for International Students I', I would say it's going pretty well. Dutch is a funny language - it is in some aspects very similar to German and in some aspects very similar to English, which is tempting you to do some freestyle while trying to speak it, but I can guarantee you that your gut feeling will ALWAYS steer you wrong. There are many rules to the language that mostly make little or no sense and if you master them, the battle is still not over cause there's like a billion of exceptions to those rules, because why not, right? I'm telling you, even Dutchies themselves have no idea how the bloody language works, but unlike us expats, it just comes to them naturally. Oh well.

Speaking German is a certain asset when it comes to learning Dutch - it helps you understand a lot more and get a grasp of some of the grammar, but on the other hand sometimes when you would expect Dutch and German to be similar, they are a whole another thing. I am definitely guilty of accidentally using German words in Dutch sentences (and hoping for the best) and oh boy, if I had a cookie for every time someone told me that I sound German while speaking Dutch! I mean.. Why the hell don't I sound German when I actually try to speak German then???!

Of course the textbook is orange...

If you never attempted to learn Dutch, you probably think that the trickiest part about it is making the choking sound that Dutch people do when trying to pronounce the letter G (no hard feelings Dutchies, I think your choking sounds are adorable). Even though I was blessed with living in a province with a so called "soft G", which is a bit easier to somehow fake than the regular G, I am still convinced that I sound pretty damn stupid while pronouncing any word containing this goddamn letter. However, believe it or not, there are even more evil letters - and especially letter combinations - than G. Let's take for instance the bloody double vowels (they probably have a special name, but I am no expert, so I will just proceed to call them double vowels, my apologies). The Dutch language has a little excessive usage of vowels for the taste of someone, whose native language contains full vowel-less sentences (I have done a little research and found the longest Czech vowel-less sentence - I have literally zero clue what on earth it means, but for the language gourmets among us, here goes: Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn). In Dutch, you will easily find words, that contain 3 e's in sequence (tweeëntwintig) and double vowels are extremely common. That would not be a problem, if the pronunciation of these double vowels wasn't literally random. 'Oe' is pronounced as 'u', 'ou' is pronounced as 'au' and 'ui' as 'aui' (that might be my favourite one), because why the hell not? Basically, the consequence of all this is that when I attempt to read something in Dutch, I take a fair moment to figure out all the weird sounds that I have to make in the sentence and at the end of the day I still get them wrong and sound silly. But hey, no one is born a master, right? I am very lucky with all the Dutchies I have around me who support me in this journey and even the ones who did not believe at first, are now being proven wrong by my progress (well, at least I hope!). I am working hard towards being fluent in Dutch, as I believe that knowing the language is the only way you can get fully integrated, even in a country with excellent level of English, like The Netherlands.

That's it for today! I still have a lot to talk about, so I will try my best to make the posts more regular. Next time it will be about one of the best weeks in my life, which included my first ever visit to Amsterdam! Thanks for reading and see you next time. :)

Katerina