Ten days ago I stopped writing blog posts.  I stopped going to the gym.  I stopped everything except studying Dutch.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked this hard at anything – probably high school.  I took four courses in my graduating year.  They ran from September to June.  100% of my grade in each came from the June exam.  Oh, how I studied!

I couldn’t put in the same quantity of hours as then, but I gave ‘er.  I’m sure in Grade 13 I was pretty familiar with the course content as June rolled around … but not this time!  Dutch is a shock, often a mystery.  This does not compute for my Canadian brain.  It has me appreciate how difficult it must be for people to learn English.

Tuesday was the listening, reading and writing parts of the exam.  The first listening exercise was a person phoning their school and giving the receptionist lots of basic information.  We had the form in front of us and our job was to find mistakes that the receptionist had made in taking down the info.

The voices came so fast!  I was thinking “What did she say there?” as the conversation moved on to some future mistake that I didn’t even hear.

Isabel played the audio three times and I’m unhappy to say that I never did hear the last item: The course cost was listed as 120 euros.  But was it really one of the other two possibilities – 90 or 180 euros?  I had no clue so I left the checkmark in the “120” box.  Turns out that was what she said … so I got it right!

The writing part included drawings of daily activities.  We were to state what the person was doing.  First was a fellow taking a shower.  “Search your words, Bruce!”  I wrote:

Hij hebt een douchen.

I couldn’t remember what the verb “take” was (nemen) so I thought I’d get by with him having a shower (hebben).  Nope.  Then the question was whether “a shower”  was “een douche” or “een douchen”.  If I’d been alert, I would have reasoned that a singular noun is unlikely to end in “en” because these letters are often used to show a plural word.  But I wasn’t alert.  So a second nope.  In mathematical terms: Nope + Nope = 0 … no marks for that sentence.  (Sigh)

I knew I had done better in other parts of the listening and writing.  And I thought I had answered most questions correctly about the reading passages.  I woke up Wednesday thinking “I passed the first exam.”

Later Wednesday was my oral exam online with Isabel.  She asked me questions – general ones about my life in Belgium, and also ones about what she was showing me onscreen, such as the costs of various products and what a woman was doing in the supermarket.

I had prepared a cool answer for a question I expected Isabel to ask … but she didn’t ask it!  So at the end of the exam I said “Please ask me this question:

Welke taal spreek jij?

(What language do you speak?)

The standard answer was:

Ik spreek Engels en een beetje Nederlands

(I speak English and a little Dutch)

Just for fun, this is what came out of my mouth:

Ik spreek Nederlands en een beetje Engels

Why not?