Re: Survival langauge

Blue Hornet wrote:

>
> Chris Waigl wrote:
>
> > Then, in eleventh grade, my class went on a trip to Athens. Our
> > Ancient Greek teacher (we were in our third year of learning it)
> > taught us some greetings, "thank you", "please" and "excuse me",
> > "I'm sorry"... These little expressions frequently turned
> > indifferent Athenians (who understood our English quite well) into
> > extremely helpful people: Just showing that, even though you don't
> > speak the language, you've made that little bit of effort made an
> > excellent impression. Of course, all the Ancient Greek helped to
> > pick up a bit more, most of which I've since forgotten.
> >
> > Chris Waigl
>
>
> Agreed. The first time I traveled to The Netherlands I was amazed to
> find that most Dutch speak better English than many (most?) Americans,
> and were polite and friendly to boot. Taking the trouble to learn a
> little bit of Dutch, "unnecessary" though it may have been, made
> things even smoother.
>
> On my second trip, I learned that Immigration and Customs at 6:00 AM
> on the flight over is not the time to greet the guard with a
> spoken-like-a-native "Goed morgen!" unless you had stayed a lot longer
> and learned a hell of a lot more Dutch than I did on the first trip.

The Netherlands is very much a special case, where a lot of the
population speak English to such a level that I think there's a case
for thinking of Dutch English as another world variety. This to the
extent that I dread my annual group coming over from the University of
Limburg; with the exception of a few "if I would see him I would tell
him"s they don't make many errors. The Dutch feel very proud of their
language abilities, and tend to get a bit sniffy if foreigners
patronise them by trying to speak Nederlands.

Donna?

DC
.

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