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Re: YADPT (D=Dutch)

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Sunday, November 9, 2003, 16:34
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