Comment by dep_b

Comment by dep_b 12 hours ago

2 replies

I speak Dutch to anyone that serves me in English. Which is pretty common at bars or shops in The Netherlands nowadays. At first I thought doing that was rude, but I'm actually doing people a favor to have the chance to learn Dutch. We can always switch to English when it gets too hard or confusing.

And to be honest, somebody that refuses to even try to understand that "Twee croissants en een koffie, alsjeblieft" means "Two croissants and a coffee, please", but replies with "English please" instead can kindly go fuck themselves.

At least TRY

bojan 12 hours ago

While I agree with your point, don't underestimate how different the pronunciation is between languages, especially if you have an English monolingual on the other side of the counter that is not used to ever hearing anything other than English.

Especially the word "croissant" is tricky. Chances are they they only got "koffie" in your example sentence and had no idea what came before it.

  • roryirvine 7 hours ago

    Honestly, the pronunciation in this case is probably closer to English than the spelling is!

    I don't know any Germanic languages, but it turns out I can understand a surprising amount of Dutch just by closing my eyes and listening to the flow of the sounds.

    Afrikaans is even easier, as I get the impression that the word order is almost always the same as in English, whereas in Dutch it sometimes isn't (I think... as I say, I don't actually know either language!)