This video has taken longer to get out there than any other video I’ve ever done. It’s crazy!

I remember first recording the footage for 9 Reasons to Learn Dutch literally a year ago before we moved house so that I’d have some footage to edit while we would be living out of boxes.

Needless to say, this video never got made. That footage never saw the light of day. Although it is still on my hard drive!

Back in April, when I had a mammoth 2 day filming session for Mastering English Phrasal Verbs Through Story, I also recorded a couple more films, including this one again.

When I was editing this more recently, I decided I had no choice but to tell you all this because my hair looks so different. Crazy times.

Anyway, I want to share this video and 9 reasons to learn Dutch with you now as well as a bonus Dutch travel essentials guide. Read on…

Dutch is a language I don’t speak well at all anymore. It needs defrosting, as Alex Rawlings so wonderfully put it earlier this week.

But it is a special language to me. It’s the first language I really set out to learn on my own without any academic need or materials.

Backtrack to January 2014. I was teaching like crazy. Tuesdays in particular were all over the place.

I had a couple of hours in the mornings to plan (if I didn’t have any last minute italki tutees booking lessons with me), a drive to a French lesson teaching 2 siblings, quick lunch in my car, a drive across to a primary school for a full afternoon of small group French lessons, a drive across town for my next 2 lessons, quick dinner in my car, 15 minutes in a library, 2 one hour lessons for GCSE Spanish and A Level Spanish and French. Then home for about 8. Phew.

Those 10 minutes in the library became understandably sacred. A tiny breath of air in an intense day.

Incidentally, I have really vivid memories of publishing my early blogs in that library on those Tuesday afternoons.

Once the blogs were published, I’d browse the language learning section. I was already learning German and French with the Open University at the time but I couldn’t resist the draw of the Dutch book each week.

After all, I’d just started a blog about languages. I was going to need something to write about!

So I loaned Teach Yourself Dutch and set myself my first solo language learning challenge right here on Lindsay Does Languages. See…

If you want to read more, here are those cringeworthy early blogs about Dutch. Argh!

This is my favourite one though: 8 Interesting Things About Dutch

What happened next…

I fell in love with Dutch very quickly. I still love the language.

So why haven’t I progressed any further?

Well, as I’m sure we can all relate to, there’s just too many languages and not enough hours in the day.

Other languages fell into my life that demanded attention: Portuguese, Japanese, Burmese…you know how it goes.

I’m sure that Dutch will be a language I revisit in the future. And I can’t wait until that time comes.

9 Reasons to learn Dutch