Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Friday dudes!

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@blinky465 yep … they’re about 90% correct. I noticed that the sound quality is pretty bad for this one so that makes it even harder to understand for outsiders. It is as close to the written spelling as you’re likely to get given that there is no real official spelling or grammar. Like any dialect it is something you sort of absorb.

I think part of the reason is that 90% of the world and the media you consume are in English so you don’t have a need to understand foreigners. And most foreigners will adapt to you.

For us it is the other way around as we need at least one secondary language. Kids get taught English when they’re practically fresh out of kindergarten. I think primary school ? I only learned it when I was a few years older, but we did have German and French language lessons as well (I was glad I could drop French after the 1st year though).

German was the easy part as we watched a lot of German tv (including some of their dialect shows).

I think it helps that the Dutch language has borrowed a lot of foreign words so we’re sort of used to some of the pronounciations.  I do have to say that it annoys me how easily we borrow English words when there are perfectly normal Dutch words. I bet you would be able to recognise a lot as a visitor …