A post featured over on The Cambridge Language Collective
Illustration Credits: Evie Heathcock
I had really hoped this article would start with some tales from a wintry city break to Amsterdam; of ice-skating against the backdrop of the Rijksmuseum, warming up with a mouthful of the doughnut-like Oliebollen, and of wandering along the canals admiring the fluorescent artworks that pop up everywhere for the city’s annual Light Festival. But as the Dutch would say, Helaas Pindakaas. Literally, ‘alas, peanut butter’, or rather, ‘too bad’ – for we live in an age of last-minute travel restrictions and so my trip to Amsterdam was scuppered by the announcement that the Netherlands would be entering a strict lockdown at 5am on the morning I was due to travel.
My Eurostar vouchers date back to March 2020, when I had persuaded College to fund a trip over the Easter Vacation so I could brush up on my Dutch ahead of my exams. Needless to say, I didn’t make it, have now completed my Dutch language courses, and have had so many cancelled trips to Amsterdam to visit my friend Eve in her hometown that her family are quite rightly beginning to wonder if I even exist. In the absence of any actual travel material, then, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learnt from my time spent dabbling in Dutch.
I was one of twelve students in the final class of DU5 – a paper offered to Second Year MML students which provides an ‘Introduction to the language and literature of the Low Countries’, and which has now sadly been discontinued. We spent two hours a week trying to wrap our heads around the Dutch language, and one hour a week on a whirlwind tour through Dutch and Belgian culture. We looked at the literature and history of the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, read an amusing Flemish novel about cheese (Kaas by Willem Elsschot), and spent a fair amount of time discussing stikstof (nitrogen) and the ongoing stikstofcrisis which was at the time worrying Dutch farmers, politicians, and citizens alike. Attempting to progress in a language in the time given to an introductory language paper is no easy feat, but by the end of the year, thanks to the patience of our teacher Erna and her anecdotes, I felt I had both a solid foundation of the language and an insight into a culture I had previously known very little about.
I continued learning Dutch on my Year Abroad at the University of Vienna, where I once again found myself in the final cohort. It seemed like the University had finally cottoned onto the fact that the Nederlandistik department consisted of an eclectic mix of students who were there for the sake of extra ECTS credits, those who wished to study in the Netherlands, and exchange students like myself, and so had decided to discontinue the Dutch Studies degree. While I did empathise with my outraged Dutch teacher, from a practical perspective, it’s hard to disagree with the statistics. In a country like The Netherlands where English is ubiquitous, and where many top degree programmes are taught in English, it’s hard to see learning Dutch as a necessity.
As I head into the final five months of my languages degree, I can say with some certainty that studying Dutch was one of the most unexpected but worthwhile decisions I’ve taken. When I perhaps felt at times weighed down under piles of eighteenth-Century literature, completing Dutch exercises and beginning to understand seemingly incomprehensible texts reminded me of the fun that language learning brings. Listening to catchy upbeat music by contemporary artists such as Snelle or the ephemeral melodies of Eefje de Visser, finding new Dutch idioms – many of them unsurprisingly cheese-related – or simply being able to share a joke with Eve might not seem like monumental discoveries or achievements, but they are the little things which make the hours spent poring over grammar textbooks worth it. In fact, it was perhaps because my endeavour to learn Dutch seemed of so little practical use that I perhaps enjoyed it all the more. Knowing that no final grades or admissions requirements depended on it removed a pressure that I feel in other parts of my degree, and one that really shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Departments teaching Dutch and other less studied languages seem to be closing their doors across Europe, and with the numbers of pupils taking languages for A-Level decreasing each year, with particular drops in the number of candidates taking German, it hardly seems that there’s going to be a sudden reverse in interest. The waning popularity of teaching and learning languages is not something I propose to solve in a few concluding remarks, and one that needs a collaborative and grassroots approach. I’ll end by saying that my experience of learning Dutch has greatly enriched my studies over the past few years, motivated me in my language learning, and has introduced me to a fascinating and delightful corner of Europe which I wouldn’t have otherwise explored. I’ve pronounced words I didn’t think I could, learned about periods of history hardly touched upon elsewhere, and become rather fond indeed of the language and culture of the Netherlands.
Let’s hope I can get to those olieballen and stroopwafels sometime soon then.