Tweet12-11-2010 om 16:28 by Sueli Brodin

Was I destined to live in a Dutch speaking country? Two of my closest childhood friends at the French Lycée in Tokyo were of Dutch and Flemish origins and I remember telling them that I liked their family names very much. My own name, Brodin, was plain in comparison to Van Hecke and Kasteel!

I later worked for the international editions of the women’s magazine ELLE in Paris, and again felt the same instinctive attraction when I saw the names of my new Dutch colleagues in Amsterdam: Maarten van den Biggelaar and Saartje B. I couldn’t wait to phone them and hear them pronounce those intriguing double vowels in their names.



Ruud van Nistelrooy's name: unmistakably Dutch

Even now after living so many years in the Netherlands, I still have an unexplainable weak point for Dutch names which contain combinations of letters that don’t exist in French. Any first or last name including double vowels and diphthongs such as “aa”, “ee”, “uu”, “oo” , “ij, “ui”, “ei” or “oe” looks special to me.

Who knows, this might even be an unconscious reason why I prefer living in the Maastricht region rather than in Amsterdam or Groningen.



My six year old daughter Sacha has now started to learn to read and write at the local Dutch public school. She is learning the letters of the Dutch alphabet one by one, although not in the alphabetical order, with a special method involving hand signs for every sound the letter evokes. She is immediately being taught all the diphthongs of the Dutch language as well.



The other day I asked her which new letter/sound she had learned and she answered: “é” but when she wrote it down for me, I realised that I had not visualised it properly, because she meant “ee”.



A new world is opening up for her and she is fully enjoying the experience. She tries to decipher every word her eyes fall upon, as if in a game. The Dutch language abounds in two, three and four letter words and there are also plenty of children’s books written exclusively using those very short words.



I asked her about her Dutch lessons and she explained it all in detail:

"Every day we have language lessons and practice letters and words.
But we don’t learn a new word every day.
Today I learned the word “koek”.
The teacher showed it on the smart board.
First she showed the word "koek".
Then she showed the letters in the word.
We learned the letter “k”.
The teacher wrote the letter on the smart board.





Sacha shows me how to write and pronounce the letter "k"

She made a special sign with three fingers and said the sound “k”.
Then we did the sign together and repeated the sound “k”.
Then we learned to write the letter.
The teacher asked us to write it down 20 times on a big piece of paper."



Sacha wrote down many letters "k" in the shape of a flower

Sacha told me that she likes learning new letters because “when you learn more letters you can also make new words.”

It is endearing to see the way she uses the words she learns to invent new stories.



At the end of our conversation, she asked me if she could tell me a story she had thought up. I told her I would write it down for her, and listening to the words she started dictating to me, I couldn’t help smiling every time I saw myself typing those inimitable Dutch double vowels and diphthongs.

Een vogeltje zat eens op een boom
Maar het vogeltje kon niet vliegen
Hij lustte alleen maar bladeren
Geen wormpjes
Hij wou nu eens een appel proberen
Maar een wormpje zat erin
En toen zei hij:
Een appel met een worm is best wel lekker!

(A bird sat on a tree
But the bird couldn’t fly
It only liked leaves
No worms
This time it felt like tasting an apple
But there was a worm in it
And then it said:
An apple with a worm tastes good after all.)

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