Life on Tapp: Life may well be busy but it would be boring otherwise

Much of my time has been taken up learning Dutch in preparation for our next holiday. Photo: AdobeStock

Life is currently as busy as it ever has been: a young family, a full on job, a reasonable social life as well as plenty to do in the house – I barely get half an hour to myself.

Blaise Tapp writes: As a result, some things slip – those planned meet ups with friends that I haven’t seen in ages keep getting postponed, while the garden looks wilder than it ought to. But, rather than trying to lighten my ever growing load I have, inexplicably, added to it by recently starting to learn a new language.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, every day for the past two-and-a-half weeks, I have been learning to speak Dutch, much to the amusement of my children, who have always regarded me as the archetypal Brit abroad, one whose default has been to speak English that little bit more loudly.

My inability to speak a foreign language, other than knowing the very basics of French, has long been a source of much embarrassment to me and with another holiday to the Netherlands fast approaching, I decided I should at least give it a go.

As has been pointed out to me countless times in the past fortnight, visitors to that wonderful country don’t really need to speak Dutch, due to the fact that the majority living there seem to be accomplished linguists. That’s besides the point as I want to know what I am ordering from the menu, rather than having to rely on a very obliging, not to mention busy, waiter to translate everything.

Since I signed up to a well known language app, I have become somewhat addicted to learning Dutch and now know the basics, including how to wish someone a good evening as well as being able to say that horses don’t drink soup. How far that will get me when I visit the Netherlands in a month’s time, I don’t know but many of the new words I have learnt are sticking, which is a start.

I have a long way to go as my accent is terrible – my teenager gleefully informs me that I sound like I’m doing ‘comedy German’ – think Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo.

Where I will take it once I return from our trip to the land of bouncy cheese and tulips remains to be seen but I do aim to learn a couple of hundred new words by then, which is a couple of hundred more than I knew last month.