NATIVE ENGLISH FOR NEDERLANDERS

Ronald van de Krol

NATIVE ENGLISH FOR NEDERLANDERS

A personal, cultural and grammatical guide

Het Financieele Dagblad/Uitgeverij Business Contact

To Jeanet, Kate and Ayat

And with thanks to Helen Borkent for her eagle-eyed editing

Zevende druk, juni 2008

© 2007       

Omslagontwerp:       
Boekverzorging:       

Ronald van de Krol
Uitgeverij Business Contact, Amsterdam
Het Vlakke Land, Rotterdam
LINE UP boek en media bv

ISBN       
D       
NUR       

9789047001683
2007/0108/325
801, 610
www.businesscontact.nl
www.fd.nl

Foreword

This is a book for Dutch speakers entering the jungles of English. On their way they are bound to encounter the quicksand of prepositional phrases, the dangers of illogical spelling and the sheer frustration of verb tenses like the present continuous.

More than merely hoping to rescue the Dutch speaker from English’s many grammatical traps, I especially want to point out the language’s riches and joys. To understand English and speak it properly, you first need to know and appreciate the Anglo-Saxon culture – linguistic and otherwise – that underpins it.

English is more than a grammatical challenge. Often it is also a mind-set, an intelligence test and a cultural riddle.

Native English speakers have an advantage over the English speaker. They were born into the language and subconsciously indoctrinated into its unspoken rules and assumptions.

Not everyone can be born in Sydney, Cincinnati or Chelmsford. For those who weren’t, and particularly for the Dutch speaker, Native English for Nederlanders is designed to be a grammatical handbook, a cultural guide and a handy reference for the elusive ‘linguistic etiquette’ that sets speakers of proper English apart from those who simply bumble along in the language.

It is not my intention to turn every Henk into a Hank, every Tjeerd into a Ted or Marijke into a Mary. Not only would this be an impossible task, it would also make the world a more boring place in which to live.

I can’t turn you into a real native, nor do I want to. I do aim, however, to equip you with the background information and tips you will need to step into the skin of native English speakers and truly grasp the reasons why they speak the language the way they do.

Once you have done that, you will finally be ready to speak proper English with real aplomb – while ultimately remaining true to yourself.

I know that this can be done, as I took the same trip in the opposite direction – from native English speaker to a speaker of pretty proper Dutch – and lived to tell the tale.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Language with an attitude

Visual versus literary

Welcoming and all-inclusive

Love affair with English

Doe maar gewoon

2. American or British?

A Yank in Britain

Spelling

Words and expressions

The great divide

3. Linguistic etiquette

Pleases and thank yous

Expletives

Deference, hierarchy and humor

4. English as code

Multiculturalism

Sexist language

Euphemisms

Legalese

Latin

Jargon

Sports as metaphor

5. ‘Dutch’ mistakes in English

Problem #1: spelling

Problem #2: small words and big words

Problem #3: verb tenses – the Dutch syndrome

Three cautionary examples

6. Numbers and squiggles

Weights and measures

Time of day

Dates

Telephone numbers

Big numbers

Counting and grammar

Counting and individual words

Squiggles

7. Beyond Babel Fish

Gadgets

Spell-check

Double trouble

Triple threats

Translation traps

Word order

Cultural equivalents

8. Go Native or not?

Don’t mimic the natives

Don’t mimic the expats

Don’t mimic the Dutch

Introduction

Fifteen years into our marriage, my Dutch wife Jeanet turned to me one day and said ‘I like you better in English.’

At first I thought we were facing a marital crisis. Later I learned that it was more serious than that. We were actually confronting a linguistic problem of huge proportions.

As an American of Dutch descent, I had arrived in the Netherlands at the age of 25 with a rudimentary grasp of Dutch, mostly of the huis, tuin en keuken variety. I could understand everything that was said around me, thanks to my immigrant parents having spoken Dutch to me and to each other during my childhood in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. In most cases, I could even respond in basic Dutch, though I was unable to distinguish between de and het. I had managed to reach the ripe old age of 25 without realizing that it was het boek, not de boek, for instance.

If I didn’t want to languish at my steenkolen level forever, it quickly became obvious that I needed to work hard and I did. I learned ’t kofschip. I memorized which words took the article de and which took het. I figured out where and when to drop that most difficult of Dutch words – er – into sentences like Er waren er vier.

Then, having struggled to master Dutch, I was suddenly to find out, years later, that my wife actually preferred me to speak English. In my own language I talked faster, made more jokes, laughed more frequently, argued more furiously, but I also knew when to be oblique, when to be polite and when to hint at a subject rather than confronting it head-on.

In English, in short, I was myself. I had learned a new language, Dutch, but had remained true to my native linguistic culture. Speaking Dutch as a true American is like playing water polo according to the rules of basketball. It can be done, but not easily or at all convincingly.

Ultimately, I learned the hard way that the new language you learn as a non-native speaker cannot be divorced from the culture from which it springs, and that a proper command of the language involves more than simply stringing the right words together in the right order.

If I were going to learn to speak proper Dutch, I would have to become far more direct, like the Dutch themselves. I would have to drop a lot of the politeness which riddles English but which sounds so exaggerated in Dutch. In the end, I would also need to drop the superlatives that are demanded of English speakers (‘great!’, ‘wonderful!’, ‘fantastic!’) and adopt a more deadpan style. I needed, in a nutshell, to doe maar gewoon and pretty quickly, too.

Speaking good Dutch, or good English for that matter, requires that you understand and absorb the culture and adapt yourself accordingly while also – somehow – remaining true to yourself. It’s a tall order but certainly feasible, provided that you are helped on your way by friends, family, colleagues and, I hope, a book like this one. Can you ever truly go native? Probably not. But even the status of ‘near native’ will bring you closer to reaching your goal of speaking good, proper, native English.

In any case, my own experience in learning proper Dutch later in life was the point of departure for a series of weekly columns I write in Het Financieele Dagblad aimed at Dutch business people who need and want to speak proper English at work. At first, I tackled mostly sticky points of grammar. But pretty soon I found myself knee-deep in murky cultural issues. I needed to explain, for example, why Anglo-Saxons are so formal and hierarchical and how this gets expressed in their language, English.

More and more, I started injecting personal experiences and opinions into the texts. For a financial journalist trained at Reuters and the Financial Times and now deputy editor of Het Financieele Dagblad, I was at first extremely uncomfortable about stepping out of the background of the story and into the foreground. But it was a necessary step. If I were going to explain how to speak proper English, I would need to explain how I learned proper Dutch.

The two storylines were linked. For me, learning Dutch was all about dropping deference, toning down politeness and learning up-front directness. For Dutch speakers in an increasingly English-speaking world, the challenge is the reverse – to come across as more polite and indirect, while at the same time mastering the subtleties of grammar.

Having come from the opposite direction to perfect my Dutch, I understand the challenge of speaking proper English. Partly it’s a matter of hard work in the field of grammar and of rote learning when it comes to spelling. But above all it’s a question of understanding the underlying linguistic culture. Once you’ve figured the Anglo-Saxons out, it’s far easier to speak their language with ease and assurance.

Accordingly, grammar is dealt with entirely from the Dutch person’s point of view. Dutch speakers make certain common mistakes in English because they’re coming at the language from a perspective that is completely different from that of a French or Chinese speaker.

Wherever possible, I discuss the cultural differences between the Netherlands and Anglo-Saxon societies which account for these, often unwitting, faux pas.

Unlike most books about foreign languages, this book doesn’t concentrate on the long, difficult words but on the short supposedly easy ones. As we shall see, it is these short words that you’re liable to mix up, not the long ones. By the same token, I devote a whole chapter to the use of numbers in English, a subject that is essential to understanding and writing proper English but one that most books and teachers ignore.

One aspect of language that I disregard is your accent. If you are old enough to read this book or to be interested in its subject matter, then you are almost certainly too old to get rid of your Dutch accent. Given all the other challenges which English continually throws your way, your accent should be the least of your worries.

Your Dutch accent can actually be an asset. English-speaking people expect you to have an accent and enjoy listening to it. They consider it charming and ‘olde worlde’. Besides, accents abound in Anglo-Saxon countries. Although you should do your best to pronounce ‘th’ correctly, be aware that the path to speaking native or near-native English has little to do with how you pronounce words. Instead, native speakers of English share a common cultural base which, unlike their accents, can be studied, adopted and even copied by the astute Dutch speaker.

In eight relatively short chapters, I hope to cram in all the experiences, attitudes and prejudices that go into making somebody a native English speaker. Usually, this process takes a minimum of 18 years but I am aiming to condense the highlights into just 160 pages.

At the same time, I attempt to illustrate why in my view the Dutch are so handicapped in speaking English properly. First, they have a utilitarian attitude to all languages, including their own. For this reason, they are unwilling to devote the time and energy needed to master the language. They mistakenly think: ‘People seem to know what I mean when I speak English, so why should I worry?’

Second, the Dutch overestimate their skills at speaking English but underestimate the cultural component at the very core of the language. Because directness is valued above all other virtues in the Netherlands, Dutch speakers are insufficiently aware of what I call linguistic etiquette. In English, words, intonation and language itself can be considered rude. In Dutch, by contrast, you are considered rude not because of what you say, but because of what you do.

Third, by focusing on what they are trying to say rather than how they say it, Dutch speakers of English all too frequently fall into the trap of relying on literal translations from Dutch into English, many of which go disastrously wrong.

For reasons I will explain later, I have chosen to use American rather than British spellings. More importantly, even though the book is aimed exclusively at a Dutch audience, I have opted to write it in English. Good teachers of French or German or Dutch will immerse their students in the new language from the start, and why should a book not do the same?

The only difference is that I am not trying to teach English to beginners. My assumption is that readers already have a working knowledge of English and, indeed, use it regularly, whether it be at the office or on vacation. But I also know that, despite years of practice, most Dutch people never approach a near-native level of English.

You cannot learn English from a book, not even this one. But you can be made aware of the pitfalls and the rewards of trying to speak it well. My intention, then, is to provide a cultural, grammatical and personal guide to that most infuriating and fascinating of languages. If you are not a native by the end of the last chapter, then I trust you will at least have gained a better understanding of how to communicate effectively with those who are.

1. Language with an attitude

English would seem an unlikely candidate to be the world’s pre-eminent language. For one thing, its spelling is illogical and inconsistent. At the same time, English grammar is complex and confusing and, what’s worse, every rule seems to be accompanied by a long list of exceptions.

The English language is also far from being a unified whole, making its universal appeal even harder to understand. The two main strands, American English and British English, are in disagreement on everything from the spelling of basic words like color (colour) to the meaning of certain expressions. In American, a decision is ‘up to you’, while in British it’s ‘down to you’.

Yet for all its obvious defects, English has emerged victorious in the world battle of the languages. French, Spanish, Russian and German enjoy strong regional support but none of these languages has the potential to eclipse English on a world scale. Chinese, in terms of sheer numbers of speakers and the overwhelming potential of China’s economy, may one day put up a good fight. But in the meantime, hundreds of millions of Chinese are busily learning English – and with good reason. English remains the passport to success for people worldwide, and this state of affairs is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

Indeed, the day is not far off when more Chinese speakers will be fluent in English than the 385 million people who live in officially English-speaking countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. Already, 11-year-old boys in Shanghai play complicated, simultaneous computer games with children in Mexico City, Johannesburg and Vancouver, and the language they communicate in is English.

English, it would seem, is taking over the world. Like a virus spreading out of control, it is infecting languages and cultures at a dizzying rate. The Dutch need to learn English, in the end, because the Danes, Portuguese, Koreans and Brazilians are also doing so.

So many non-English speakers speak English today that the language is arguably no longer the exclusive property of the Americans, the British, the Canadians and the Australians. English belongs to everybody, not just the Anglo-Saxons, and perhaps it’s about time that the world simplified the language and made it easier to learn and use, especially for all those poor Spaniards, Russians and Chinese trying to get to grips with its impossible grammar and arcane expressions.

A Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrière, has come to the aid of nonnative speakers by inventing ‘Globish’, a simplified English that is stripped of its extremes and reduced to a vocabulary of just 1,500 words. His thinking developed during his years as a globe-trotting IBM executive. Countless times he watched Koreans and Greeks talk to each other in a kind of ‘English Lite’. He began noticing that they understood each other perfectly well, even though native English speakers could make neither head nor tail of what was being said. (You won’t be surprised to learn that expressions involving heads and tails have been eliminated from Globish because they’re, well, too English.)

And it’s not just the French who want to pare English down to workable size. In his book Steenkolen Engels Dutch linguist Marc van Oostendorp makes the case for letting standards slip. (Indeed, his subtitle is Een pleidooi voor normvervaging.) Why should Anglo-Saxons dictate that the rest of the world speak English their way when, after all, not everybody is an Oxford professor clad in tweeds and prone to spouting verses of Shakespeare?

This view, if I may be so bold, is a typically Dutch way of approaching language: language is a tool for communication, and must therefore be functional. Foreign languages are necessary to communicate and to cope in the wider world that lies beyond the Netherlands’ borders. Anything that is difficult – like English spelling, pronunciation and grammar – gets in the way and can best be ignored. This, at any rate, is a very common Dutch approach. It is the linguistic equivalent of the zesjesmentaliteit that bedevils Dutch schools and puts the country at a competitive disadvantage to other cultures.

Still, such level-headed pragmatism has served the Netherlands well, producing a nation of savvy traders and successful business people. Today the same practical point of view should serve to convince the Dutch speaker of the importance of learning to speak English properly. The hundreds of millions of Chinese who are busily learning English are doing so with the intention of speaking as near-native English as they possibly can. For Dutch speakers to be content with mediocre rather than excellent English is short-sighted.

Proper English is the standard against which you will be judged, even by Americans who tell you that you speak such ‘great’ English. In my view, it is essential to understand where that standard comes from. As we shall see, English speakers and Dutch speakers could not be further apart when it comes to how they view their own languages.

Visual versus literary

The advantage of writing a short book about a complex subject like English is that it leaves plenty of room for sweeping generalizations. So here goes: the Dutch ‘problem’ with English is paradoxically also a great cultural strength. Dutch culture is visual in nature, while Anglo-Saxon culture is literary or word-based. This fundamental divergence in traditions has produced very different attitudes towards language.

To the Dutch, language is a tool. To Americans, the British and other Anglo-Saxons, language is a celebrated art form with subtle shades of meaning, much like a Dutch 17th-century painting or landscape. But it is also elastic and evolving and therefore contemporary. As a language, English is seductive because it lends itself to almost any situation, regardless of the speaker’s own cultural background.

Before I am inundated with outraged letters from both sides, let me explain why I am painting this language picture so starkly. I am convinced that it explains:

• why the Dutch quickly achieve a basic competence in English but then fail to advance to a higher level;

• why the Dutch always prefer English-language texts to those in their own language;

• why the Dutch find it so difficult to give a good presentation in any language, and why they find it intimidating to be playful and inventive with English;

• why the Dutch underrate language skills in general and why they are prepared to accept second-rate English.

To me, the cultural split between design and language – between Dutch reverence for visuals and Anglo-Saxon belief in words – is clear.

In the past the Netherlands has given the world Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Vermeer. In more modern times the country has distinguished itself by its strong tradition of design and architecture. Where Dutch art was once highly detailed, it is now generally strak, a Dutch word with mostly positive connotations. The Dutch penchant for strong, unsubtle design in bold, primary colors is reflected in everything from the visual signposting at Schiphol Airport to the playful Dutch guilder notes (now sadly replaced by boring euros). Dutch industrial design is rightfully world famous.

Dutch literature, on the other hand, has been less exportable, due perhaps to the Netherlands’ status as a small country sandwiched in between such literary giants as Great Britain, France and Germany. I am certain, however, that this is not the real reason. The Dutch are at their best when they are creating visual exteriors and interiors, not the internal worlds of poetry and fiction.

American, British and other Anglo-Saxon cultures celebrate their writers and their written languages far more than they do their painters and their visual heritage. The best example is Shakespeare, whose legacy to his own language is unsurpassed in world literature. Hampered by a difficult, illogical and frustrating language, English-speaking countries have turned this weakness into a strength, transforming their native tongue into an art form that has taken the world by storm.

Images  Vondel versus Shakespeare

I may be wrong but I can’t think of any lines from Joost van Vondel that have been absorbed into everyday Dutch. Shakespeare, by contrast, continues to influence the language to this day. The Bard of Stratford, as the 16th-century playwright is also known, is credited with introducing 3,000 words and phrases into the language. We all quote from his plays and sonnets, often without knowing it. For Dutch speakers, the ability to drop a well-timed line from Shakespeare into conversation is an asset.

Common expressions that spring directly from his plays include ‘a foregone conclusion’ (Othello) and ‘into thin air’ (The Tempest). Some famous phrases used by other people are second-hand Shakespeare: Aldous Huxley took the title of his novel Brave New World from a line by Miranda in The Tempest, while William Faulkner found the title The Sound and the Fury in Macbeth.

In business, a bit of Hamlet sometimes comes in handy: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’ In another setting, try ‘All that glisters is not gold’ (Het is niet alles goud wat er blinkt) from The Merchant of Venice to warn against first impressions. (But remember that Shakespeare wrote ‘glisters’ not ‘glitters’.)

Nearly every word game that you can think of – from Scrabble to crossword puzzles – finds its origin in either America or Britain. Other countries and cultures have translated these games into their own languages, but the drive to play with language – to see spelling as a competitive sport, for example – is peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.

To me, the best example of this obsession with language for language’s sake is the long-running BBC Radio 4 program ‘Just A Minute’. Celebrity guests are required to speak, off the cuff, for a full 60 seconds about a random topic without any hesitation, deviation or repetition. The game requires an amazing mastery of vocabulary, as no single word, including the most basic elements of the language such as the word ‘I’, may be used more than once. It also requires a remarkable gift of the gab to be able to speak on and on about a nonsensical subject. The winning contestant must possess a knack for presentation as well as a talent for bull-shitting. At its best, the program sums up the English speaker’s love of words, of playing with language and of talking for the sake of talking.

Images  Biblical expressions

Another instructive radio program from the BBC is ‘Desert Island Discs’. For the past 65 years, this popular interview program asks entertainers, politicians and celebrities to identify which eight records, plus a book and a luxury item, they would take along if they found themselves marooned on a deserted isle.

For our purposes, the most interesting aspect of the program is that the castaways are assured that they will find the complete works of Shakespeare, plus the Bible, in their tropical paradise. This promise is designed to stop interviewees from routinely choosing either Shakespeare or the Bible as their one book.

The Bible is a rich source of expressions in English. Not everyone is aware that they’re quoting loosely from verse when they say things like:

• ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Cain speaking to God about Abel in Genesis)

• ‘Eat, drink and be merry’

• ‘I’ll have his head on a platter’ (Daughter of Herodias referring to John the Baptist (Johannes de Doper)

• ‘Money is the root of all evil’

• ‘The blind leading the blind’

• ‘Practice what you preach’

• ‘All things to all people’

• ‘Suffer fools gladly’

• ‘A leopard can’t change its spots’

Welcoming and all-inclusive

The beauty of English is that it is a welcoming, inclusive language. You don’t have to be an Englishman, Australian or American to feel passionate about it, or to feel that you own a tiny part of it. Unlike French or Dutch, where bureaucratic and meddling government-funded bodies watch over the language and make weighty pronouncements on subjects such as the tussen-n in pannenkoek, English recognizes no central, absolute authority. English is what we make of it.

In that sense, English is very much a language of our times. When the Dutch talk about an Anglo-Saxon way of doing business, they generally use this term as shorthand for an economic model in which market forces rule supreme. English as a language is the expression of these forces at work. The highest ruling body in English is not some government committee but English speakers themselves, plus the sales figures of the various competing dictionaries which they buy.

In English there is no official Groene Boekje. In fact, dictionaries often disagree with each other on the spelling and usage of words. The matter is ultimately settled by market forces. In American English, a word gains recognition only when it is included in best-selling dictionaries such as those published by Merriam-Webster. In British English, this role of arbiter is played by the august Oxford English Dictionary, but also by Collins. The more dictionaries sold, the more these individual publishing companies determine what is right and wrong linguistically.