Americans Abroad

Don't forget, I'm in a different country almost every day when I'm working, and I mostly work with Europeans. I'd have to be some kind of idiot--and a selfish idiot at that--if I were to show up in some country between two and four times a month, and not learn the languages of people with whom I have been working for decades.

When we opened our office in the Netherlands in 1990, we had only one guy there, and he understood English quite well. However, every time I met him in his own country, he spoke Dutch with everyone BUT me. I felt like an outsider, and a nuisance outsider at that. I wasn't a tourist, but someone who was there on a regular basis. I said, this can't be impossible to learn. I asked him to speak to me in Dutch slowly, explaining to me as we went along, so I could get used to it. He was a native of the Netherlands, but his native language was not Dutch, but Dréents, a language spoken in the far north of the Netherlands. He therefore spoke standard Dutch with the clear pronunciation of a person fluent, but speaking a second language. I learned quickly.

When necessity and convenience coincide, it gets a lot easier, because motivation and instant gratification go side by side.