Re: YADPT (D=Dutch)

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> And then there's this time I was watching TV with my friend, listening to a
> girl interviewed who spoke such a strange dialect of Dutch that they had to
> subtitle it (they do that often on Dutch TV). I then asked my friend who
> has a very good knowledge of Dutch dialects what dialect she spoke. I could
> understand pieces of what she spoke, but never the full story. He then told
> me: "she's speaking Swedish!".
>
> So to me now Swedish is essentially the strangest dialect of Dutch I ever
> heard ;))) .
Oh, my ... I thought we had established that Swedish was a dialect of Chinese?

To me, spoken Dutch sounds like something I would understand if the damnable
speaker spoke a bit more slowly. I was actually able to make out a decent
fraction of the content of what the guide was saying in Dutch on my canal trip
in Amsterdam, but that was a case of extremely careful speech, and the fact
that she took each bit also in German and English (and French) meant that I
never had to lose the thread. But I certainly couldn't do this without my
knowledge of English and German.

I can read simpler texts in Dutch, like newspaper articles, and understand
most or all. Causes some embarassing situations when like when I yesterday,
for no particular reason, was translating various ads aloud; I had repeatedly
to answer the question how come that I speak Dutch with that actually I don't.

(Writing, let alone speaking, Dutch is way beyond what I can do.)

                                                          Andreas