Hallo, allemaal! Hoe gaat het met jullie?
Good Day, Language Enthusiasts!

On Saturday, 8 August 2018, Polyglot Indonesia collaborated with Erasmus Training Centre (ETC) Jakarta to conduct a meetup titled Going Dutch (Culture & Language: Dutch). The ETC team shared their insights and knowledge on Dutch language and culture along with our regular Dutch Table participants.

The first session commenced with an opening remark by Meneer Fons van Oosterhoud, Director of ETC. Afterwards, Mevrouw Gentha Sally from Outreach and Admission took over and explained about ETC and why we should take Dutch class in ETC to our 56 participants. To let them had a good glimpse about ETC’s learning environment, two lecturers from ETC were invited to deliver some simple Dutch language presentation. First lecturer was Mevrouw Ita Pohan, presenting “Nederlands is gemakelijk” (Dutch is easy). In her presentation, she explained several basic Dutch spelling and pronunciation rules, and ended her session with a “find the direction” game. Participants were given a map and tasked to choose left or right based on which correct word she pronounced. The next lecturer was Mevrouw Dilla who taught several basic Dutch sentences and then challenged the participants to pronounce them correctly.

Next came the time for our Dutch language coordinators presentations. Rinaldi gave a presentation on “De Korte Geschiedenis van de Nederlanse Taal” (History of the Dutch language in short), followed by Arvin Tehupuring’s presentation “The Netherlands and Us” which explained Indonesian-Dutch relations in history. We also sang “Wie ben jij?” together with all the participants. The third part of the meet-up was discussion session. Dian, Vina, Githa, Fikri, Alex, and Victor from the Dutch table gave out topic cards to each language tables which contained a specific topic to discuss. After the discussion session was completed, each table went on to the deliver their presentations.

English Table explained about the education for aristocrats in England and the Netherlands. Russian Table compared the iconic Christmas characters both in Russian and Dutch cultures. German Table presented about Goethe, the famous German philosopher in comparison with the Netherland’s Erasmus. French Table delivered a short presentation about cheese culture. Spanish Table explained about colonial history and rivalry between Spanish and Dutch Empire. Italian Table presented about famous painters. Arabic Table mentioned about a specific Arabic guttural sounds which are also found in the Dutch language. Mandarin Chinese Table compared about the current bicycle riding tradition in China and the Netherlands. Japan Table talked about the trading and business connection between the Japanese Shogunate and the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the 16th and 17thcenturies. Korean Table explained about street food tradition in Korea compared to that of the Netherlands. Dutch Table shed light about several stereotypes of the Dutch people.

In our last session, we played two games for the participants. The first game was to deduce from the three photos shown on the screen which was the current Dutch Prime Minister. The winner, Rian Nugraha Affandi, walked away with a box of delicious stroopwafel. The second game is a tongue twister challenge, in which three participants were asked to memorize a Dutch tongue twister for two minutes and then pronounced it as accurately and quickly as possible. The winner, Dian Safitri, received the grand prize of the day, a Dutch-Indonesian dictionary, co-written by Mevrouw Susi Moeimam and Meneer Hein Steinhauer.

Thank you for Erasmus Training Centre Jakarta for the fun and educational collaboration! Special thanks to Hoshino Tea Time for the great venue! Hope to see you again on another Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter's meetup! (For the photo documentation, please check our Facebook fanpage album)

Heel bedankt en tot de volgende keer!