Singapore Expats

hi to all,

i am thinking seriously of living in holland to be with my gf( she's a dutch) next year .

my intention is to learn dutch locally...
equip with a intermediate level of dutch
so as it will be easier to find a job hopefully.

i am a diploma in Electrical Engineering and working in Sales all along,

could anyone give some advice on my plan?

thank you

english is widely used in holland. i worked there without knowing dutch! i think you should plan to secure a job first before anything else.

From personal experience . . .

My fist overseas job was in Holland, I had no Dutch language knowledge, only English, German and French, smatterings of Spanish.

Not knowing Dutch was not a problem as most everyone there speaks English quite well and if not then they do, grudgingly, speak German.

Day to day life zero problem.

Working life . . . of course you do need to speak, read and write Dutch. I didn't require it as I was working for a US company but my then girlfriend tried to get a job there and she had to learn the lingo.

After a while you learn it anyway, it is quite easy, actually.

One point, though. Holland s a miserable country when it comes to food and weather, among other things. The best aspect of Holland is the proximity of Schiphol and the excellent highways to Belgium and Germany.

Go there at your peril, don't burn your bridges here as I have only knwon one foreigner to really like it there, he even married a Dutch lady and had kids . . . though they've all moved back to the US now.

Summa summarum . . . learn the language thereand at the same time see if you can handle living there

Personally, I worked in Rotterdam for a while and found it the most unsafe city I have ever been in, muggings are rife.
Holland has some beautiful parts and I visited some, but generally the cities are like most other euro cities...with good and bad.
The cannabis culture is an eye opener....with loads of ageing hippies sitting in bars out of their boxes on skunk!
One thing is that in the winter....it is absolutely freezing!
I had no language problem as English is widely spoken.
Good luck

Ah, the winter. It's not that it is so cold, I spent some times in New York and Chicago!!!, and that is cold.
It's just that it can't decide whether it is raining, hailing or snowing . . . and it is miserable. Add to this the never-ending wind, due to it being such a flat country, and it really is uncomfortable.

Miserable place

Well whether it's miserable or not is a matter of opinion of course

I found learning the language quite tricky because so many people there speak English . The best way i found was to take on work through job agency's . Just simple manual work then you tend to integrate with other foreigners and lower educated dutch people who often are only too pleased to help you learn. The problem with that was the pronunciation sometimes and when i finally got round to speaking the language i sounded like a cross between a morrocan and a turk . My dutch mates found that hilarious.
As far as written dutch goes thats quite straight forward once you get to a decent level of spoken word. The TV is a good way as most TV and movies have sub titles rather than being dubbed.
If you ever figure out the difference between De & Het ( the & it) let me know