Re: Survival langauge


Django Cat wrote:
> 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.


Perhaps. I never got to any kind of conversational ability in Dutch.
It did seem that wherever I went, though, people were (at least seemed
to be) delighted that I had taken the time and trouble to learn
acceptable the words for and pronunciation of "goed morgen",
"alstublieft", "bedankt", "tot ziens" and other simple phrases, and
that I could pronounce many town and city names 'properly', and that I
was always willing and wanting to learn another word or phrase. I
suspect that if I had ever gotten to a 'nearly-conversational' ability,
then I'd have found "okay, I'll work with you like this for five more
minutes, and then we're switching back to English to actually *have* a
conversation".

.

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