Learning Kinderlijke Dutch
Chason, Lisa

>>SPEAKER: Hi, can you give us your name?

>>LISA: My name is Lisa Chason and my story is going to be about when I lived in Amsterdam for almost twenty years. My children were born there and I learned to speak Dutch and I learned to speak through them by communicating with them. So my first level of Dutch was very kinderlijke Dutch and I have some artifacts to show what that was about. 

>>SPEAKER: You can just keep going.

>>LISA: Oh ok. Will it get edited?

>>SPEAKER: Right now I'm not sure. Right now they're not being edited, just go on with your story.

>>LISA: So in my mid-twenties I moved to Amsterdam. My husband, whom I met in the United States is Dutch and when I went there originally to travel and finally to settle, what turned out to be seventeen years of living there. I had two children while I was there and living in the Netherlands is not necessary; everybody say it is common knowledge or common wisdom, that it's not necessary to learn to speak Dutch. You can manage there by speaking English. Well that's true but you really stay on the periphery of society of course. If you're really living there and you're going to have children and they're going to be in the public schools and you've got neighbors, you want to learn to speak Dutch. So that was a process that over the whole seventeen years evolved. The point at which it took the biggest leap, my being able to really communicate, was when I had my children. It was through speaking with them and reading things that were meant for them and engaging with the culture and the society because of them that I really started to become a Dutch speaker. So when I heard about this literacy project I thought that that was an example of someone's literacy developing under special conditions. So it was also an interesting aspect to the story, I had many Dutch friends but also English-speaking friends and American and British and we often talked about raising children bilingually, what kind of issues were involved with that. The solution that we came up with, and everybody has their own solution; I'm convinced there's no perfect way to do this. The advice you get is that each parent should speak their native language and the children should respond in that language and they should keep the two languages apart. But this was very unnatural in our situation and what we did was the children would speak Dutch, that was their total environment, and I would speak English with them and they would speak Dutch back to me. In that way I felt that they were getting a passive understanding of English and I was developing my Dutch in that way. So that was our method, but having said that I use the fact that the level of Dutch was geared to them was one that was really useful for me to learn from. So I would also try, to this day they laugh at my accent, but I would try reading to them in Dutch and I would read their books and so on. This was also, at that particular stage, a very fruitful way to develop the language for me. It's gone off.

>>SPEAKER: It's still recording.

>>LISA: Ok. So I brought a couple of things to show. One is a classic book that every Dutch child knows and a writer, her name is, and I'll say this in Dutch: [Speaking in Dutch] and this is "Yip and Yanuka". These stories are, at least in the 1980s and I'm assuming still but by now they are getting a bit dated, are short little stories, they may be each a page and these characters are really familiar. Also the illustrations and they're used in many marketing campaigns and it's about a little boy and a little girl who lived next door to each other and they get in all kinds of mischief and many things happen to them. Through that they develop language but they are beloved stories and many of the children know them by heart. So I would read these with them and some of them are I would say now that they're dated I don't know how to really think of that in terms of the Dutch culture. I once made a suggestion in a parents group that I was participating in, wouldn't it be interesting if we switched the roles and every time you read Yip you said Yanuka and every time you said Yanuka you said Yip because they're totally sexist. I mean Yip does all the active things, that's the boy's name, Yip does everything that is active and Yanuka is always watching him and she's scared by things and he battles on and so on. So they're really like strongly stereotyped. Wouldn't it be interesting if we just changed the name and read them to the kids but change the names? Nobody wanted to hear that, the stories are just too classic I think is the things or maybe in the 1980s people weren't thinking along those lines there and they didn't like it at all; but I think it's a great idea. I wonder if - I bet those kind of things do get more played with. So, I don't know what to do, how you want to show that. Just by way of showing some more of what it meant to be developing as a Dutch speaker under these circumstances. My daughter was in what they call "Kresh" so child care from the time that she was several months old to when she started school and you used to have to write in a book back and forth from the caretakers at the "Kresh" and it would go home with the child and the parents would write things and you would communicate in this way. So when I look back at this, it's a mix of Dutch and English and they humored me and they were very understanding. They would always write, and they thought that they were helping me to learn, they would always write to me totally in Dutch and they insisted that I write totally in Dutch but then it's sprinkled with words like it starts off with "Hopefully" [Speaking in Dutch] this kind of thing. So it was mixed with these two types of languages and they accepted that. So this is a good example for me also of the level that I was at at that time and also the grammar is terrible and the spelling is terrible but I was struggling to communicate with them. It's because of doing that kind of daily communication of living a Dutch life being this non-Dutch mother but surrounded by Dutch family and culture that I was stretched to learn the language. I'm not sure that I would learn the language the way that I did under different circumstances. I studied French when I was in high school and I've tried to study a bit of Chinese because - and now, by the way, I'm a teacher of English as a second language to speakers of other languages. I started doing that work there, I was also an English language editor while I was there. I worked in English using my skills as a native speaker because Dutch people, while they are very good in English, often their writing needs to be, if it's going to be for publication, it needs to be worked on because it's not the equivalent of a native-speaker or publishable English. So this was the kind of work that many native speakers did that were living there. I also taught English classes. So when I came back to the United States several years ago, I got my Master's degree in that field and now I found myself mostly teaching Asian students but it's all based on my experiences. Also for the Asian students that are here, they're in a similar situation that I was in learning Dutch; I was learning Dutch as a second language there in this English emersion situation surrounded by English and they can draw on so many things that are surround them. It's no longer English in a classroom or English as foreign language as it would be called if they were learning it in Korea or Taiwan; that's the same situation I was in so I'm often able to talk to my students about what I went through and I can relate to some of the things that they're going through when they're especially trying to climb plateaus. There's a tendency to get to a certain level and you can communicate well enough and how do you get past that level? There were all different ways that people helped me to do that and little tricks that I created in situations that enabled me to then go from level of five old Dutch to a more mature level. In the end I got my diploma for speaking Dutch as a second language and I did very well on that exam and I'm considered a fluent speaker and based on that I even have a Dutch passport, a European passport. And this is the well-worn Dutch-English dictionary that was never far from where I was. It was a particular period of my life where I never 100% understood what was going on and yet it was so creative in because of trying to engage and communicate with people and get the meanings that I didn't know, made myself understand anyway, and interact with a culture that wasn't my own. 

>>SPEAKER: Thank you for that.

>>LISA: Ok, was that literacy? 

>>SPEAKER: Yes, that was wonderful.