Dutch Cafe

Tuesday evening was the "Dutch Cafe."  It is a program put together by the Language Institute here at Erasmus.  Since they recognize that most people in the Netherlands speak English and that there is, therefore, limited opportunity and incentive to actually put Dutch into practice, they have started this program this year.  It is modeled on a similar program of several years which they have had for international teachers and employees of the University.  Everyone from the five classes was invited to get together at a cafe for an hour-and-a-half to speak only Dutch.

We went to the Hoofdstuk II, which is, literally, "Chapter 2". (I didn't ask, but it didn't seem like the kind of cafe that serves marijuana--most of those places are, as far as I can tell, in South Rotterdam in the way seedier parts of town.  At least that is where I periodically see little bitty zip-lock bags with pictures of marijuana leaves on them (I keep wanting to take a picture of the baggies for you guys but I am never in a part of town where it seems like a good idea to start randomly taking pictures of things)).  The cafe was really nice (it was a Tuesday evening so I assume that things may be different on the weekend) and it was quiet enough that you could hear other people talking fairly easily.  There were lots of big wooden tables and comfy chairs and all of the walls, under the edges of the windows, were lined with all kinds of old, picturesque books that you could read while you sipped your cappuccino.  They also had some pretty, pleasant-looking tables outside.

Tuesday night was the first night of the Dutch Cafe so I decided to give it a shot and it turned out to be a lot of fun.  The coordinator for the Language Institute was there and so was one of the teachers from the course (I think they plan on rotating the baby-sitting) and this week it was the lady who teaches our class.  Four students from my class attended, two students from one of the other classes, and six or seven students from the German -speaking class came, so from the "normal" classes, our class had the greatest representation by far.  The German students, because of the similarity of Dutch to Deutsch (see what I did there?), have a big advantage over us English speakers.  Not only have they gone through the whole book but they seem to speak much more quickly and fluently.  They are also pretty sure of themselves--the kept getting told to stop speaking German and to speak only Dutch and one of the guys said "Hey, we're so far ahead that we don't even need to practice anymore."  That was when the girl sitting next to me, who is in my class, asked if my family had emigrated because they hated Germany, like everyone else she knew.

Communicating only in Dutch was more difficult and also easier than I had expected.  On the one hand, everyone else is taking just as long as you are to come up with recognizable sentences (except the Germans, of course) and so there is less pressure to hurry up and say something.  Also, since we were meeting the other folks for the first time, we were able to use the bulk of our Dutch vocabulary since it has been pretty much devoted to first-contact type situations.  I think that later cafes might be more difficult as you try to discuss things beyond your home country and when you arrived in Rotterdam.  Also, the teacher and the LI coordinator did a very good of facilitating conversation: I know I didn't really want to start out with asking perfect strangers personal questions about themselves.  Also, you accidentally pick up a lot more vocabulary than you know, what with listening to the radio and hearing people on the subway and, when you really have to, even if your sentences end up being simultaneously juvinile and convoluted, you can usually end up with something resembling a comment or question.

On the other hand, no matter how much vocabulary you can pick up from watching Dora the Explorer and Sponge Bob Square Pants dubbed over in Dutch (Nickelodeon and Nickelodeon, Jr. provide programming to Dutch TV and Dutch TV streams it over the internet), there are certain times when that fails you and, if you aren't careful, you kind of end up frozen, thinking "Why can't I remember to verb "to tell", why, oh, why . . ."  (It's "vertellen", by the way, not really the most difficult verb to remember) And the half sentence seems to stretch on forever . . .

But the teacher and the coordinator were really good about giving vocabulary help, as well as giving pronunciation and idiom tips and, all in all, I think it was a really useful experience, as well as being a lot more fun than I had really anticipated.  We actually ended up hanging around talking (mostly in Dutch) for over two hours.