I come back to Amsterdam a lot, and every time I arrive, I feel a little sheepish about speaking Dutch.I actually know some of the language — I lived in the Netherlands as a child, in Eindhoven, down in the south, and I learned the language the way a 10-year-old learns anything, which is on the hockey team, from other 10-year-olds calling each other disgusting names or giggling at bodily functions and parts. So even the Dutch I remember perfectly has limited application when doing adult things like taking a taxi or ordering a bottle of wine.Still, 50 years later, what’s left is rusty but functional, and I insist on using it, even though Amsterdam is a city of cosmopolitan sophisticates who all speak perfect, nearly unaccented English and who greet my efforts with the gentle patience you’d extend to a sweet, elderly Labrador that has somehow learned how to push open a door.
This is the ritual: I attempt to frame an elementary Dutch sentence, I get tangled up somewhere around the second clause, and a friendly Dutch person swoops in with flawless English and rescues me. It has happened dozens of times, in shops and cafés and train stations, and I have always assumed the problem was simple. My Dutch is bad. Their English is excellent. What else could it be?
