It's true that English is THE global language. The UN, The EU, pretty much every major organisation has English as its offical language or one of several. And being an English-speaking country ourself, most people just think, "Why bother? Everyone speaks English anyway."
Not being one to shy away from a challenge, I decided in January that even though I live here and don't need to learn a new tongue, I damn well WANT to!
I studied French at school and did reasonably well (I got a B) but the fact it was school, coupled with the fact that I don't live in France meant that I never cared much about it and hardly ever did any proper studying. I'm just lucky that I have a great memory so I managed to recall enough to get a decent grade.
That was eight years ago though (yes, I'm THAT old). and I can hardly remember any of it and in fairness I didn't really want to learn French again anyway. So I had a dilemma: which language to choose?
There are an estimated 6,000 languages in the world currently spoken (please don't ask me to quote a source on that). I only needed ONE. French was discarded straight away. Most of the other 5,999 would be too obscure to thoroughly study so I needed one with plenty of books and tools to help me.
Eventually I narrowed it down to three: Russian, Dutch and Polish. After checking out some text in all three I quickly discarded Polish as no language should EVER have so many Zs in it! With Russian, I didn't want to have to learn a new alphabet so I eventually ruled that out too, which left Dutch as my winner!
I'm fortunate enough to have a very good friend who speaks Dutch so that made me subconsciously lean towards it as well. I've always been a big fan of Dutch accents too (except Steve McLaren's) so this made me feel upbeat before I'd even started.
My aim is not to just learn enough to have a basic conversation with a Dutch person. I want to be FLUENT. I type that in block capitals because it is my long-term goal. This blog is something to help me chart my progress and enjoy the lighter side of starting something completely new and unknown.
I have no idea how well I'll do or how I'll retain what I learn but the journey should be fun! So for now, all I want to say is: HALLO!
