I had to laugh, not just at your story but at the fact that it happened in The Netherlands. Daar wonen wij!!! (translation for non-Dutch speakers: "that's where we live"
. My wife is Dutch (although she prefers to be thought of as Frisian). So, she speaks three languages (Dutch, English and Frisian). I speak two (Dutch and English), three if you consider Glaswegian as a different language (and I'm not talking about the language Billy Connolly uses on stage). All our kids are bi-lingual and we speak English to the grandkids so they'll learn that without even being aware of it.
May I ask how and why you came to learn Dutch? Did you learn German first? When I was in my Learning Dutch class, all the students used to hate the German students. Not on a personal basis, but because they seemed to pick it up so quickly. It's not surprising, because in many ways Dutch grammar is a sort of simplified German grammar. The der/die/das construction is much more complicated than the de/het construction and if you know that "haus" is paired in German with "das', then in Dutch you know that "huis" is automatically paired with "het'. So, in less than a month, the German students would be speaking pretty good Dutch while the rest of us were struggling to describe what we had for breakfast.
Groetjes uit Nederland.
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read