DuoLingo

Dutch is a very interesting language and something that is new for everyone on the trip. Almost everyone tried learning a bit using DuoLingo before we left Boston but not many people stuck with it for more than a week. Luckily English is widely spoken in the Netherlands and we haven’t had much trouble finding our way around. Most of the Dutch we’ve learned has come from road signs, because we are on the road so much biking from town to town. “Let op!” means “Watch out!” and it’s used very frequently for various reasons. Pronouncing street and city names has been quite the adventure for everyone in class. Here are a few of the most challenging ones:

Scheveningen:  [ˈsxeːvənɪŋə(n)]

Zoetermeer: [ˌzutərˈmeːr]

Tweemolentjeskade: [there’s not even an explanation for this one]

As you can guess we all have a lot of fun with it, and the local professors appreciate our attempts! A small group of us were playing Dutch Clue last night and made it a rule to guess only in Dutch (Professor Pimpel with the engelse sleutal in the biljartkamer?). It was definitely the funniest game of Clue I’ve ever played. Food has been another thing that we all figured our relatively quickly. We are responsible for most of our own meals-which means grocery shopping and some initial guesswork on what we were buying! Some of the direct translations are really strange (peanut butter here is pinter kaas, which directly translated means peanut cheese) but we’ve all been able to find what we wanted!

I wish there was a bit more focus on language in this dialogue, but we are going into a lot of detail about the transportation infrastructure and it would be difficult to do both. I hope one day I can return to the Netherlands to see how much I remember from this trip.

Until next time, doei!