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Exchange
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Amy says she was not fluent in the language, though she has taken three years of Spanish at school. “Now, I can speak it. In fact, I’m still thinking in Spanish,’’ she said, referring to her recent arrival home to Washington.
Forgetting her hard-earned Dutch is one of Heather’s fears.
“I don’t want to lose my Dutch,” she said with determination, saying that now she speaks to herself in Dutch in order to converse with someone in the foreign language and hopes for a Dutch friend at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she will spend her freshman, year in college.
A vivacious and articulate teen, her head topped with a mass of tossled blond curls and sporting a pair of authentic wooden clogs. Heather said when she arrived in Holland the only experience she had with the language is what she was able to learn in a few brief weeks from Father Verbeke in Washington, who gave her several lessons and helped her to compose a letter to her host family.
Once on Dutch soil, Heather lost • all desire to converse in English.
“I wanted the Dutch to speak Dutch to me, so I could learn the language,” Heather explained, adding that the Dutch teens she attended school with for the year were often more interested in polishing their English. “I would tell them, ‘speak Dutch, speak Dutch,” she said.
Amy’s experience with the language was somewhat different.
“I made many new friends, but it was often hard to have a conversation,” she said, explaining that often she wished to speak in English to make herself understood. She said the slang, found in any language, was difficult to understand in her host language and made communication difficult.
But language is only one aspect to be learned of the host country.
Heather said she learned not to expect the stereotypes often imposed on Dutch people.
She explained that before she left for Holland, the exchange program briefed each student, explaining i some of the differences between Eu- l ropean and United States cultures. '
“They were utterly false,” she said with determination. “They told t us to expect the Dutch to be less clean, which is not true. And they ' told us the Dutch may not be as l
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