Applying to grad schools, help requested

[Jenne]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

[Don Coyote]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

Don't lie. y'all just want to keep your language to yourselves so you can make jokes about us in front of us.

[Rumckle]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

Don't lie. y'all just want to keep your language to yourselves so you can make jokes about us in front of us.

I'm not sure they would

However, at the end of the 17th century the Dutch 'lost' their sense of humor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_customs_and_etiquette

[Triple Zero]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

It's true, though. If you're at a party or in a bar with a group of Dutch people, they'll all start speaking English, out of friendliness or something. Such a nice gesture, are you going to stop them and ask if they could please speak Dutch because you want to immerse yourself in the language? While at the same time risking missing what could be an awesome evening out, because you probably can't understand half of what's being said? Sure I bet some really dedicated people would, but I can understand it's just too easy to simply go along with it.

[Jenne]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

It's true, though. If you're at a party or in a bar with a group of Dutch people, they'll all start speaking English, out of friendliness or something. Such a nice gesture, are you going to stop them and ask if they could please speak Dutch because you want to immerse yourself in the language? While at the same time risking missing what could be an awesome evening out, because you probably can't understand half of what's being said? Sure I bet some really dedicated people would, but I can understand it's just too easy to simply go along with it.

No no, I'm laughing because it's TRUE.  I have a colleague who's Dutch, and she says she can tell when there's Dutch speakers taking the TOEFL while she's rating.  They get some of the highest marks, hands down.  It's hard to tell a Dutch speaker from a Britisher very often, except they do have a bit of a Slavic twang to a lot of their pronuniciations.  But on the whole, their accents carry very little of their first language.  They also seem to "get" American humor, so their use of idiomatic language is also pretty amazing.

And she replied, "Well, English isn't so hard to learn, after all."



I just told her, tell that to all these Chinese students we are listening to...

[Triple Zero]

You'll need to get the Dutch to stop speaking English to you first, though.

It's true, though. If you're at a party or in a bar with a group of Dutch people, they'll all start speaking English, out of friendliness or something. Such a nice gesture, are you going to stop them and ask if they could please speak Dutch because you want to immerse yourself in the language? While at the same time risking missing what could be an awesome evening out, because you probably can't understand half of what's being said? Sure I bet some really dedicated people would, but I can understand it's just too easy to simply go along with it.

No no, I'm laughing because it's TRUE.

Didn't think otherwise, I was just giving an example.

An even better example, 10 years ago I was at a demoparty (like a LAN party but with computer art instead of gaming) in Germany, and me and a bunch of people were chatting outside. It was a group of people from all over Europe and even though there were no native English speakers around, the lingua franca was of course English. But the Dutch part of the group didn't know eachother that well either (mostly just from online), and after a couple of people in the group went back inside, they kept talking English, I had to break it to them [in Dutch] "hey uhm, aren't we all Dutch right now?"

I have a colleague who's Dutch, and she says she can tell when there's Dutch speakers taking the TOEFL while she's rating.  They get some of the highest marks, hands down.  It's hard to tell a Dutch speaker from a Britisher very often, except they do have a bit of a Slavic twang to a lot of their pronuniciations.  But on the whole, their accents carry very little of their first language.  They also seem to "get" American humor, so their use of idiomatic language is also pretty amazing.

That's so cool The only reason I can think of for this, apart from our education probably being pretty good, is that afaik we're one of the very few European countries that plays a lot of American and British shows on TV with Dutch subtitling. At least with me, I really have the idea that watching that stuff a few hours a day when I was young subconsciously taught me a lot of my English (as opposed to Germany, where they dub everything, for instance).

Do you know if there's any linguistic research or something confirming that idea?

On that note, another cool thing I heard a few years back, was that they were thinking of implementing same-language-subtitling on TV in India, to improve literacy. I dunno how that came out, though.