• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • That said, most Dutch speak excellent English

    That’s not true, not excellent English. Many speak enough to get by, except the elderly and the young, and some of them speak it well, fewer still excellently. Over four years, I’ve met probably a handful at most who could express their deepest thoughts and desires while pronouncing “th” correctly and their As not as Es.

    Many banks won’t take you in if you don’t speak Dutch and it’s harder to find a job (this was in the news just recently, as it happens: nearly all international students are struggling in the job market because they generally don’t learn Dutch, despite there being so many vacancies). You can definitely get by with English, and I’ve heard of many people living here decades without learning Dutch too, but if you want to live well, that’s another thing altogether.

    The good news is Dutch is easy if your mother tongue’s English or German but there is indeed a problem in the Randstad of it being hard to convince anyone to let you speak it with them, in part because they often overestimate how well they speak it. There’s a relatively famous quote from colonial Indonesia about how the Dutch colonisers would rather speak bad Indonesian than Dutch, which the Indonesians spoke fluently. I think it’s like a feedback effect with the reputation they have for knowing second languages.

    Anyway, details details.





  • They’re excluded, and the rental commission is one of the bodies who’s inspected us on the behest of the landlady. There’s a little sentence at the end of the report saying something like “we realise that we’ve inspected the property based on a fraudulent tip-off”.

    The other thing is that the rental commission come down and measure the place as part of the test, so if it was being used for commercial purposes, we would’ve been caught red-handed there and then.


  • I used to be in a group that use it, and it works very well; we made great use of the mailing list feature, which Proton lacks beyond “contact groups”. The only thing is getting an invitation, which I seem to recall reading they’re not doing any more.









  • We’re currently being threatened with court action by our landlady for using our flat for commercial purposes. It’s obvious bunkum, and we’ve had inspections and everything that prove we don’t do it and sent all kinds of evidence to the lawyer accusing us, but the thing is that we followed a rental committee procedure last year to have the rent tested and so the landlady’s losing money or whatever. It’s all very dramatic but we’re confident because it’s so easy to prove that it’s a load of bollocks.



  • I leave my phone behind now and again so I don’t feel the obligation to always be reachable, a privilege I’m sure. I don’t often get lost but I speak the local language so I can just ask a stranger if I do. I absolutely don’t find it weird if someone’s alone and not looking at a phone and don’t think anyone around me does, though I’ve never been one to care about that sort of thing anyway. I’ve intentionally removed all the timewasting apps from my phone as well, namely social media and news and all that.