One of the joys of international travel is studying and using — alas, not mastering — the local language. But for me one of the joys of boating is using nautical language. One of the joys of cookery (I will not say "cooking" here) is using the au courant culinary language. I would enjoy doing laundry more if it had a specific lingo I could use.
But nobody here speaks Dutch. That would be strange in Ireland, but I'm in the Netherlands, and in the university and tourism worlds almost everyone speaks English. If I go into a store and ask "Heeft u coud sap?" the reply is "No, but we have cans of juice over there. What part of America are you from?"
Since this is a conference on Mathematics and the Arts I ask people I meet which side of the aisle they come from, like a wedding usher. Many people say "both," which I enjoy. And everyone asks where everyone else is from (next year I hope they make the affiliations on the badge easier to read). If they're French I switch to French, which works OK. But regression to the mean means eventually it's all in English.
It's probably for the best, because I can barely understand spoken Dutch spoken at Dutch speeds. Sometimes. The speakers on the green owl app just don't go fast enough, and there's no background noise.
Reading and writing are different matters. According to my previous classification, they're poems, not songs, because one can go back over a tricky point.
I love word play, and having two languages at hand roughly doubles the opportunities. So I did some writing in Dutch, a poem about bicycles, whose lines alternate between English and Dutch. I have lines describing bicycles and bicycle etiquette like
[On describing bicycles: Old. New. Black. Red.]
Oud. Nieuw. Zwart. Rood. / The red lanes by the road are theirs
and
Ze zitten recht... / few are wrecked...
This poem needs a lot of work. That's typical: the poet doesn’trealize what the theme is until well into it, and uses it strongly from then on,. But that leaves the first part hanging on and needing massive editing.
I got a native speaker who is also a poet to look over the Dutch part. She made a few small corrections. And I think she liked the idea.
[ps I edited this to correct the spelling in the title. I had ‘spiel,’ but ‘spel’ is both correct and better wordplay.]