Twenty minutes on the train
Read a news article end to end without stopping for a dictionary. Slow, but uninterrupted.
Learning Dutch, in public
From pointing at menus to holding a conversation. The milestones, the plateaus, and the practice that finally stuck.
Milestones
How it has gone so far
Five markers, in order. The gaps between them are where the real work was.
Step 1: Starting from almost nothing
Arrived with a handful of words and a lot of nodding. Everything sounded like one very long word.
Step 2: The first real conversation
Ordering, asking for directions, surviving a phone call. Small things, but they changed what practice felt like.
Step 3: Reading the news
Slow, dictionary in hand, and the point where grammar stopped feeling arbitrary.
Step 4: Working in Dutch
Meetings where I follow the thread, and the occasional sentence that arrives without being translated first.
Step 5: Still learning
Fluency keeps moving further out. I keep a list of the things I cannot say yet; it gets shorter slowly.
Progress log
Where I write it down as it happens
Short entries, newest first: the small steps, the weeks that go nowhere, and what is still hard. More honest than a summary written six months later.
The appointment I did not rehearse
Booked it in Dutch without writing the sentence down first, and understood the answer. The answer is the part that surprised me.
Following a conversation aimed at someone else
Harder than being spoken to directly. I lose the thread when it speeds up, but I find it again faster than I used to.
Reflection
The thing nobody tells you about learning a language as an adult is that progress is not a line. It is a set of plateaus with sudden drops, and the drops come after weeks where nothing seems to move.
What actually helped
Volume beat intensity. Fifteen minutes every day did more than a four-hour session on Sunday, mostly because it kept the language in my head between sessions. Speaking early, badly and often mattered more than waiting until I was ready. And writing things down — the words I kept forgetting, the sentences I could not build — turned a vague frustration into a list I could work through.
What I would do differently
I spent too long reading about learning instead of practising it. I also avoided conversations with people who would switch to English, which quietly removed the exact pressure that makes practice stick.
Longer write-ups
Written up properly
Ten months of Dutch, honestly assessed
What moved quickly, what has not moved at all, and the practice habits that survive a busy week.
Why I am learning Dutch
Living somewhere without speaking the language is a kind of permanent visitor status. This is why I decided to stop being a visitor.
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Also learning Dutch?
I am always interested in what works for other people. Tell me what your practice looks like.
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