My Dutch assessment turns into an assessment of the Dutch

The Dutch course is over now, and I'm please to say I passed. I'm afraid to say however that this blog post is mainly going to be a moan about the way the school grades exam results.

The UvA grades Dutch language course exam results on the following scale:

• good
• satisfactory
• weak
• very poor

This seems very strange to me. All the grades are on the bad side of good, there's no "excellent" grade achievable, the best you can achieve regardless of your performance is "good". Personally I'd rather ditch this assessment scheme and use numbers instead, at least you know where you are with numbers. These terms are so open to interpretation and cultural differences. One American peer of mine at school really found the lack of an "excellent" mark unbelievable, and I am always very disappointed to get a "satisfactory" grade. Satisfactory for me is "only just enough to pass, but a close call", but this is the second best mark you can get at UvA.

After 72 hours of Dutch practice in only 6 weeks, this scheme seems a little unfair but this scoring scheme turns out to be typically Dutch.

To be "excellent" in the Netherlands is to be "uitstekend", literally translated into "sticking out", or in other words "freakish". To be different from everyone else, surprisingly, is frowned upon here. I'm amazed by the contradiction in Dutch society which is supposedly one of the most liberal and open-minded in the world, but yet hates to see people achieving above the norm. Doing just enough to pass has become the accepted way to be in the Netherlands. And I worry for the nation I really do. Don't they realise that the rest of the world, especially the developing world, is trying very hard to be outstanding (a.k.a competitive). I can see the Netherlands slipping down a well greased slope unless they pull their socks up, try harder and forget their inhibitions about being uitstekend.

Learning Dutch

I’ve been learning Dutch (properly putting in big effort) for nearly a year now. But it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I’ve mainly been learning at the INTT at the University of Amsterdam, which I highly recommend. They have really good courses, but they are really very intense. The evening courses consist of 3 hours of classes, two nights a week (Monday and Thursday) and then at least 6 hours homework every week for six weeks. I’ve just entered the next level, I started an Intermediate course on Monday, and I’m already exhausted. Last night I was doing homework until 9:30pm about the exciting and upbeat subject of uitvaart / begraven (basically funerals, cremation and death).

I much prefer to learn Dutch in upbeat fun ways, my teacher that gave me private lessons over the summer managed to do this by helping me to learn by listening to good Dutch music (yes, I too was amazed that it actually exists, but my teacher have managed to find some nice tunes). My favourites so far are:

Acda & de munnik - Groeten uit maaiveld
Wim Sonneveld - Aan De Amsterdamse Grachten

The book that we used this summer, and in the classes at the INTT in general is also really good, but it’s also incredibly expensive at about 70 Euros. It’s called CODE. For the absolute beginner and beginner courses we used CODE 1, for pre-intermediate course and the course I’m on now, Intermediate, we are using CODE 2. It’s a good book because it covers some many different subject areas and it comes with a CD-ROM which is really interactive. It has, per chapter, at least two videos or sound tracks, which help me to listen and understand different Dutch voices. The only area I think the book lacks in sophistication is its explanation of Dutch grammar, which is very complex compared to English.

For instance, here’s a crazy grammatical rule if ever I heard one….there are two words for “because” in Dutch, these are “want” and “omdat”. Your selection of one of these two words has a huge impact on the sentence structure and the position of the words in the sentence. Here’s an example:

Ik neem paracetamol, want ik heb hoofdpijn
I take paracetamol, because I have a headache

Ik neem paracetamol, omdat ik hoofdpijn heb
I take paracetamol, because I a headache have.

No-one, Dutch or otherwise, can explain why this is so or why if you use the two words incorrectly you are speaking complete gobble-de-gook. It’s just the way it is. And there are about 7 different words (that I have learnt so far) that have this effect.

One really nice thing about learning Dutch, however, is the simplicity of some of the words. If you have a basic vocabulary, like me, you can often guess at the meaning of other words, for example:

If you know the word god = god, and dienst= service, then you can guest godsdienst = religion
If you know the word ver = far, and kijk = look, then you can guess that verrekijkers = binoculars (far lookers!!)

Anyway, all the effort I’m making is helping with life here in general. I can mostly understand the announcements at train platforms (even if they are lacking any useful information on why the trains are delayed) and the news headlines are not as totally baffling as they once were. But still, I have a long, long way to go and it’s still exhausting trying to learn.

I've got a new job in Amsterdam!

It’s about time I wrote to update all my fellow job seekers that I’ve got a job in Amsterdam! I’ve been sorted for about 4 weeks now and I’m going to be working at Philips from the 24th September. In the end I didn’t find the role through a recruitment agency but managed to sort it out all by myself. Originally, I’d applied for a different job at Philips and had interviews at the beginning of the summer. I was disappointed that they turned me down for that role, but they later came back to me with a different role, which is more suited to me anyway.

So my recommendation, after limited success using recruitment agencies, is to trawl through company sites and apply directly for everything. By all means meet with the agencies, and go to any interviews they do get for you (I had about 5 through agencies) but in the end I was better off on my own.

For a head start on finding international jobs/companies in Amsterdam, don’t forget my useful list of companies, check out their vacancy boards and apply today!:
http://sdemul.blogspot.com/2007/06/international-companies-based-in.html


Good luck to anyone else out there that is searching!

Summer of storms

In one of my previous blogs (about climate change) I wrote that I thought there had been a lot of thunderstorms this summer.

I was right:
“Meteorological Institute KNMI in De Bilt (that place again) counted 25 days with thunderstorms in June, July and August... A normal summer usually has about 14 days with thunderstorms”

Source:
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=43285

Slow or not?

I’m not sure whether this is a typically Dutch thing or not and I’m interested in other people opinions...

One of my Dutch teachers mentioned that another one of her students had pointed out to her that Dutch washing machine programmes are far too long. As soon as she said it I had to agree: the standard wash on my Zanussi Rubino II 1200 lasts about one and a half hours and for the past few months I’ve been choosing the “Quick” programme, as I’m fed up waiting for the damn thing to finish. The quick programme is still about an hour long.

However, I’ve just checked it out on the internet and it may not actually be a Dutch thing:
“These days washing machines are much more energy efficient, this is because they use a lot less water. This does mean that they wash for much longer though and it is not unusual for a machine to wash for 2 hours. So if you like your clothes in a hurry, check how long the fastest wash takes.” (http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/ba/14/Washing-Machine-buying-guide)

Has anyone else noticed that washing programmes are excessively long here? Is this a typically Dutch thing, or just a new washing machine thing? I’d like to clean this up!

A land of giants

It’s a known fact that the Dutch are the tallest nation on earth. In 2004 Dutch men averaged 6 foot 1 inches (that’s 1.85 metres) and women 5 foot 8 inches (1.72 metres). Freakishly tall people are to be found everywhere in Holland, usually bending down trying to avoid bridges and roof beams that I couldn’t even touch with my best high jump attempt.

Having such height is all well and good for the Dutch women, with their long legs and slender necks, but it has led to some problems for me while I’m living here in the land of giants. Ninety-nine percent of trousers I buy here are much too long for me and I’m forced to cut off a couple of inches and re-stitch the hems. My chair at work is too high, even when adjusted to the lowest possible level my legs dangle. The same goes for the mini-bench type things at train stations, which I find impossible to perch on (and ashamedly I have the same problem with most toilets here as well). Of course, every conversation I have now involves looking up towards the sky, risking a crick in my neck. At cinemas, it’s almost impossible not to be stuck behind a tall person, but worst of all is music concerts where I’m on tip-toes all evening to get a glimpse of the stage.

The Dutch mistakenly say they are “long”, bless their cotton socks (cotton socks which are the size of pillow cases). It’s a forgivable error but even-so the question “How long are you?” still makes me laugh. “Why are the Dutch so long?” is a question that puzzles me however. Most Dutchies will maintain that it’s because they drink a lot of milk and eat lots of dark-brown bread, but can this really lead to such elongated people?

Anyway, although I sometimes feel insignificant and dumpy living here I also wonder whether it’s really that good to have giraffe-like proportions. According to a New Yorker essay in 2004, Dutch ambulances have even had to keep their back doors open on many occasions to allow for the extreme length of their patients' legs.

Foreigner in my home land

I went back to England this weekend, for the first time since February and it felt wierd. I was surprised by:

New twenty pound notes, which have been introduced since I was away and look like fake money. They are bigger notes, with a lot of "designery" white space, purple pictures and something about the industrial process of pin manufacturing on them.

Pubs, restaurants, airports, train stations and bus shelters (all businesses) are now all completely smoke free. The no-smoking laws came into the UK on 1st July and already the restaurants are cleaner, fresher and more enjoyable.

Friday night was the 9th eviction night on Big Brother, and I hadn't seen or heard anything about this series at all. That would have been totally impossible to avoid if I were in the UK, but without any Channel 4 or E4 TV channels, I'm BB-less.

The English football season started again yesterday - 11th August - Crazy!!

Next (clothes shop) has become really really cheap and nasty. I was looking at suits for work in there this afternoon, and there wasn't a suit in there that cost more than 100 pounds. Five years ago that would have been the other way round. Next obviously facing tough competition and is heading towards the prices (and quality) of Primark and New Look.


Things change fast.