I have a certificate from the Dutch state saying I am integrated. I cannot reliably tell you what time it is.
Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them is the whole subject of this post.
Wine Tuesday
I did do lessons, after a fashion. Friends who are Dutch, patient and generous offered to teach me, and for a while we called it a class. What it became, with the inevitability of water finding a drain, was Wine Tuesday.
This is not their fault. It is the structural flaw in learning a language from people who like you. A paid teacher will make you sit in the discomfort of getting it wrong for a full hour. A friend will let you off, because letting you off is what friends are for, and because the alternative is watching somebody you are fond of struggle with a sentence about a bicycle while the wine gets warm.
So the actual conclusion, arrived at expensively over several years, is that I need to put money aside and pay a stranger. Obligation is the product. Everything else is a nice evening.
The certificate
I did pass the inburgering exams, which I mention partly out of pride and partly because it demonstrates something about exams. They are a test of whether you can pass them. There is a real amount of Dutch in there, and there is a whole section on how this country works, which I would genuinely recommend to anybody who lives here regardless of paperwork, because a surprising amount of it is not obvious from the outside.
What the certificate does not certify is fluency, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am at the basics. I rarely use it. Seven years after arriving, I am not remotely good enough to hold somebody in Dutch for a conversation, which is the only benchmark that actually matters.
Why everybody switches
The charitable reading is also the correct one. They are saving time. Their English is superb, mine is native, and there is a conversation to be had about a deadline. Nobody is protecting my feelings and nobody is showing off. They are simply routing around a bottleneck, and the bottleneck is me.
I used to find this mildly deflating and now I find it entirely reasonable. If a colleague were struggling through English while I sat there knowing we could do this in a third of the time, I would switch too, and I would think I was being kind.
My one small pleasure is that I can occasionally confuse a work colleague by answering in Dutch when they have spoken to me in Dutch. There is a half-second of recalibration that I enjoy far more than is dignified. Then I usually go back to English, because the meeting has to end at some point.
The two things that defeat me
Separable verbs. A verb which appears to be one word, and then the front of it detaches and flies to the end of the sentence, sometimes a considerable distance away, and you are expected to have been holding it in your head the entire time. You know the sentence is finished when the missing half of the verb lands. It is a grammatical structure with a punchline.
And telling the time, which nobody warns you about because everyone assumes numbers are the easy part. Half seven here does not mean what it means in England. It means half of the way to seven, so half past six. The whole system is oriented towards the hour that has not happened yet, which is either a profound insight into the national character or a trap, and after seven years I still do the arithmetic out loud and still occasionally arrive an hour early.
Am I going to fix it
Probably, and not with an app.
One honest factor: previous roles came with language classes, and this one does not. I am not blaming an employer for my own vocabulary. But there is a real difference between a language you learn on a Tuesday afternoon because your job has decided it matters, and a language you keep meaning to learn in the evening after a day that was conducted entirely in English. The first one has a structure. The second one has Wine Tuesday.
