Reading · Diary of a Language Freak

I did not choose Brussels. Not really.

I chose to stop waiting. I had finished my studies, I had experiences that Italian employers were not interested in valuing, and I was not willing to sit around while they made up their minds. Brussels was where a job appeared. I took it.

That is the honest version of how I got here.

What I did not expect was that I would never want to leave. Brussels seduced me immediately and I realised I was done with Italy in a way I had not fully admitted to myself yet. I never missed it. Not one day. That surprised people, and sometimes it still does. But it is true, and it matters for this story, because it means that learning Dutch was never about survival or obligation. It was something much more deliberate. This place was going to be mine, and I was going to build my way into it properly.

The question was how.

Before I was a foreigner in Belgium, I was a local in Italy watching foreigners navigate a new country. And without really knowing I was doing it, I was taking notes - both on themselves and myself. On how I reacted to their behaviour. On what made me feel to get in contact with someone new, and what made me feel like they were not really trying. I was also judging - for sure.

When I arrived in Brussels, that self-awareness became useful. I was now on the other side, and I had an unusually clear reference point for how I wanted to show up. Not out of virtue - out of pattern recognition. I had a sense of what integration looked like when it was genuine and what it looked like when it was failing, and I wanted to be honest with myself about which one I was doing.

So when I tell you that my first rule was do not assume Flemish people are jerks - it was not a generous impulse. It was practical.

I had seen, from my own reactions as a local, how much an open attitude changes what you actually encounter. If you arrive with the assumption already loaded, you find exactly what you are looking for.

The reputation precedes them. Dutch and Flemish people suffer from genuinely bad marketing, and if the cliché is that widespread it is probably because too many foreigners have had bad experiences. That part might be true.

But I told myself: I am the foreigner. I am the one who has to make the effort to understand people who have been living here for generations.

That does not mean accepting prejudice quietly. I have heard cheap jokes about Italy, and what I did was ignore and keep showing, through my presence and my words, my actual personality and how discordant it could feel to address those jokes to me.

That quiet insistence matters more than any confrontation. If people see you and don’t change their mind and realise what bullshit it is what they’ve been thinking, they’re not worth your time.

I made a classic mistake when I arrived in Brussels. I was part of that EU international bubble - people who speak English well and genuinely believe that is enough. I had not read anything about Belgium.

I did not understand the language divide. I told Flemish people several times I was learning French, as if that were the whole story. The reaction was cold, and at the time I did not understand why (or just thought they were jerks).

You can read about my French journey in these two pieces:

What changed things was a book voucher I received from my previous employer when I quit my only full-time 9-to-6 job. I went to a bookshop and bought two books about Belgium: one on modern political history of the country, and one that was a collection of paired interviews - one French-speaking voice and one Dutch-speaking voice on topics like sport, immigration, poetry. Those books alone taught me more about this country than years of living here had.

I should have read them in my first month. That is the one thing I genuinely wish someone had told me.

Between 2021 and early 2023, I went through several levels of formal Dutch courses - public school classes, private lessons, online modules. I am going to spare you the full chronology and just tell you what I learned from it.

The investment of time and energy was cruelly inefficient relative to the results. I could write and listen sort of decently after a year and a half. My speaking was, by my own honest estimate, A2.

The private teacher experience taught me something important about what does not work. Thirty minutes of conversation per week, no real follow-up, corrections that were never actually delivered outside the lesson (which means: some weeks you don’t produce anything in Dutch at all because your only 30-minute chance is taken by the correction of homework where you’re just sitting in silence in front of the screen - bonus: with explanations in Dutch even when the teacher can speak Italian!).

I tried to build some kind of real working relationship and was met with consistent coldness. I eventually stopped. What I took from it was not bitterness but a very clear understanding of what I never wanted to replicate with my own students: correction happens outside the class, the relationship is not optional, and warmth is not a bonus feature.

Every single time I have learned a language in my life, I have watched the same film.

Apps do not work for me. Passive methods do not work.

What works is people - real, warm, accountable human contact. A teacher I feel something for. A conversation that matters. A group where I am seen.

I am aware this makes me an expensive learner in some sense. It means I either need to rely on friends - which I try not to do, because they are not paid to be my teachers and they have their own lives - or I need a real relational structure: one-on-one coaching or a small group with genuine dynamic.

If you have always blamed yourself for not making progress with apps and coursebooks: stop. Some people need humans. That is not a weakness. It is information.

In early 2023, I found out through a Facebook group that the municipality of Leuven was looking for a volunteer to lead monthly Italian conversation classes for Flemish people. I signed up. I worked for free. It was one of the best decisions I made.

Not because I was teaching Italian. Because I was finally, consistently, in the same room as Flemish people. Real ones. People who came back every month. At the beginning it was cool and reserved - very Germanic, very who-is-this-person. But it clicked. It always does, if you stay.

Around the same time I met a Flemish person at a French conversation table in Brussels. He eventually wrote to me in English on WhatsApp. I redirected immediately: no, we are doing this in Dutch. What followed was daily written contact over several months.

I made more progress in those few months than in years of formal classes. Why? Because I need time to digest a correction and time to prepare what I want to say. A message - written, thoughtful, with space to edit - gives me that. A 30-minute lesson does not (let alone a 2.5-hour session twice a week in the evening when your brain is already fried).

I started attending events at the Flemish library in central Brussels, alone, understanding almost nothing. That was the point.

I was not there to understand every word. I was there to observe.

How do Flemish people behave in a room?
When do they laugh?
What does relaxed look like in this community?

There was always soup and sandwiches, the staple of the local daily cuisine, and watching people close their eyes while tasting the soup was genuinely fascinating to me as someone from a culture where soup is a footnote, not a ritual.

I called it going on “a mission”. Anthropological observation. You have to build your tolerance for discomfort before you can demand fluency from yourself.

I made my Instagram feed more Dutch. I went to an EdTech event in West Flanders where almost everyone was Flemish and ended up speaking Dutch at lunch with strangers. I looked for any room where the language was alive, even when the event itself had nothing to do with language learning.

At a tech event in Brussels I went to recently, I met someone. He started speaking to me in English - the event was international. When I noticed he was Flemish, I switched to Dutch immediately. Everything shifted. When you speak to a Flemish person in their language - genuinely, not just two performative words - the response is disproportionately warm. They are so used to people dismissing Dutch, or claiming to speak “a little” and producing nothing, that a real attempt lands differently.

Do not wait until you are confident to reach out. Reach out to build the confidence. It works in the opposite order from what you think.

I asked Gianmaria - one of my students, who has been living in the Netherlands for several years - what actually unblocked his Dutch. His answer:

It is a combination of two things. Letting go of the fear of being judged - because in reality, he said, you are being judged maybe 10% of the time or less. People already see that you are making an effort. And relevance: you have to talk about things that actually matter to you. Not vocabulary lists with no connection to real life. Things that are actually yours.

(Talking about things that matter to him is actually one of the things he likes the most from our classes).

He also pointed to something specific: an event about the monetary system in Amsterdam that I had found and sent him (I know him and I knew this could be interesting for him and he could appreciate it in spite of his speaking level at that time, because I knew his comprehension skills were much higher). He went. He met Dutch people. A topic he genuinely cared about, combined with real humans in the room.

On why he stopped defaulting to English, he was direct: he had been living here long enough, he had made the effort, and it was time to take the car out on the road. He acknowledged this push probably comes more naturally when you have already been in the country for a while. For someone who just arrived, the urgency feels different.

His words on writing in a community surprised me: being accountable not just to one person but publicly, to other members, creates a dynamic that private practice alone does not. You are not just practicing. You are publishing. That changes how you show up (he was talking about my Skool community he’s part of).

How I Learned Dutch (and Probably Why So Many Others Fail)

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