How to go Dutch: ‘First, learn how to pronounce inburgering correctly’
Life & culture March 14, 2016 Photo: Herman Wouters / HH Photo:
Herman Wouters / HH Five years ago Molly Quell moved to the Netherlands
as the wife of an academic for a short term project.. Now she’s single,
has fallen in love with the country and finds herself in the unexpected
position of having to integrate. We’re far enough into the New Year to
have reached the point where people have dropped the pretense of their
resolutions and gone back to sleeping in, ignoring their gym membership,
boozing it up and spending too much money. I, however, have kept mine.
It’s not because I have more willpower or am a more moral person (hell,
I’m still in my pajamas and just had four chocolate chip cookies for
lunch.) It’s because at the end of this year I have a looming deadline.
The dreaded inburgering. This website just finished running a three part
feature about the exam and, after reading those horror stories, I
thought it would be fun to try it out for myself. Integrate Due to the
current terms of my visa, I am not obligated to integrate. But I want
to. Having permanent residency makes a number of things easier,
including negotiating contracts and finding housing. It also means I
don’t have to wait anxiously every year to find out whether or not my
visa will be extended. I have two choices: Inburgering or NT2.
Supposedly, the integration exam is easier, so I figured I’d take my
chances with that. The integration exam has five components: Reading,
Writing, Listening, Speaking and (the infamous) Knowledge of Dutch
Society. (I arrived in the Netherlands prior to January 1, 2015 when the
rules changed. You should check with IND, your lawyer or an astrologer
to make sure you’re on the right track.) Four-fifths of the exams is
essentially speaking Dutch. And my Dutch language proficiency is
limited. I moved to the Netherlands in 2011 with my partner who had
taken, what was supposed to be, a year-long post doc position at a
university. Shortly after we moved, we enrolled in a course at a local
community centre offered by the local government. When the course began a
few weeks later, I’d found a position working at a nearby international
school. Let me be frank. Working 40 hours per week, with an hour
commute each way is challenging. Add to that a three-hour long course
twice a week, as well as five hours of homework a week and it is
exhausting. Tolerable, but exhausting. No English When you factor in the
utter dysfunction of the course itself, co-taught by two instructors
who didn’t seem to like each other very much, a lack of syllabus or even
class schedule and the refusal of the instructors to speak to us in
English (so much so that, on the first night of class, the teacher would
not tell me where the bathroom was because I couldn’t ask the question
in Dutch), it was terrible. I vowed I would not set foot in another
Dutch classroom and, as I was expecting to move back to the US shortly
after the course ended anyway. it didn’t seem too unreasonable. Instead
my partner was offered another position. We stayed. Then, the
relationship ended. And I stayed. Upon deciding that I did want to stay
here, I revisited my anti-Dutch language stance. I was no longer in the
position of living here because of someone else. I was choosing to live
in the Netherlands and, as such, I wanted to learn Dutch. So I found a
friendly Belgian to teach me. He is a retired engineer who is spending
his golden years travelling the world and tolerating a group of
foreigners butchering his language. Unlike my previous experience with
learning Dutch, I actually enjoyed the experience. We discussed the
news, we read Suske and Wiske, I baked cookies, his wife gave me
flowers. Most surprisingly, my Dutch improved. I was starting to
understand the conversation among my colleagues at lunch. I could chat a
bit with the other dog owners at the park. If this was a fairy tale,
the story would end here, with a fancy script reading ‘And they all
lived happily ever after. The End.’ Don’t believe Disney. Life is not a
fairy tale. Residency In 2015, my immigration lawyer pointed out that I
could, in 2016, apply for permanent residency. No more fees paid to IND.
No more anxiously waiting to see if I could stay. No more gathering
paperwork in triplicate. All I had to do was pass an exam and I would be
home free. Since the lawyers fees and the IND fees alone would finance a
nice vacation every year, I was interested. Then a few months ago, my
visa renewal was rejected. IND had, again and without notice, changed
the paperwork requirements for my residency permit. Ultimately (and
after spending a lot of money on my lawyer and my accountant and a lot
of hours at IND) it was approved. The day I received the approval
letter, I had a Dutch lesson. I walked in and asked my teacher what I
had to do to pass the inburgering exam. ‘First, you should probably
learn how to pronounce inburgering correctly.’ We found a textbook, I
ordered it and a week later, my doorbell rang, during dinner, of course.
The DHL guy handed over a package with the course materials which I put
down on the stairs before rushing back to save my pasta from boiling
over. Five minutes later, I thought I heard suspicious noises coming
from the living room. My dog was using the box as a chew toy. CDs I was
able to rescue the course materials from the clutches of my dog’s jaws
and fortunately they were unscathed. A few days later, I felt like a kid
on the first day of school as I took my shiny new textbook and folder
of materials to my Dutch lesson. My Dutch instructor went through it
approvingly. He emphasised the importance of using the e-learning
portion, so that I could listen to the pronunciation as well as practise
it myself. The e-learning programme was contained on the eight
accompanying CDs. I haven’t had a CD-rom drive since college. I didn’t
even know they were made anymore. I even asked the ICT department at
work if I could borrow a laptop with a CD-rom drive. The student helper
at the desk didn’t know what a CD-rom drive was. I was officially old.
But, fortunately, not out of luck. Buried in the fine print, in a
brochure, there was mention of the e-learning programme being available
online. One quick trip to the website later and I was set up. Purple
Easter I’ll spare you the gory details of the first few weeks of the
course. There was a lot of counting (but only to twelve) and naming of
colours (does anyone else confuse purple and Easter in Dutch?). There
are also a lot of lessons about body parts and bleeding. A child bites
its lip till it bleeds. Another child cuts its finger on a knife. I’m
unclear what message this is sending to foreigners. The weekly lesson
allotment from this textbook takes about 1.5 hours to complete. I’m
still using another textbook on conversation which my instructor and I
had been using before I decided to take on the inburgering exam, which
is about another hour of homework. Plus 1.5 hours in lessons per week.
Plus, I am also working every day with a language learning app for about
15 minutes. All told, that’s about six hours a week on Dutch. Which may
not sound like a lot, but I work around 50 hours a week, plus I
volunteer, plus finding time for exercise, household chores and, ya
know, the occasional Netflix binge. I’m also in the very privileged
position of being able to afford textbooks and private lessons. So if
Game of Thrones could push back its start date, I’d really appreciate
that.
Read more at DutchNews.nl: How to go Dutch: ‘First, learn how to pronounce inburgering correctly’ http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2016/03/first-you-should-probably-learn-how-to-pronounce-inburgeren-correctly/
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