It’s funny starting to learn a language as an adult; however much you can deride most language learning at schools in the UK, it’s difficult to replicate. And it takes a long time to get vocabulary and grammar to a level that’s good enough to be able to have a conversation. Ie most is instinctive and you’re not trying to engender how to conjugate verbs.
Dutch is an interesting language – I keep getting told how difficult it is! One hindrance is that I don’t know German, especially for sentence structure 🙂 I find it a confusing mix of words spelt same, but said differently (eg water, mayonnaise) and words spelt differently, but said (almost) the same (eg huis/house, beer/bear).
I did find this quote about learning Dutch, which made me laugh:
“We readily picked up enough Dutch to make ourselves understood… This language, which looks so hard at first, is only a sort of polarized English. Puzzle over it a little while and it jumps into your comprehension like one of those simple cryptograms made by running together all the words of a sentence and then dividing in the wrong places.” From The clock that went backward by Edward Paige Mitchell.
My one hour lesson a week means it’s going to take a while before I’m confident taking to people, but I think I’m making progress!