I don't speak much Dutch, although I did try to learn a bit before I went, using a book and CD combo I got on sale earlier in the year. According to my Dutch informants, Dutch is like a cross between English and German which the Germans think is more like English and the English speakers think is more like German! Whatever the case, I picked up a bit more in the two weeks I was there so there are certainly things that are similar to English and to the tiny bit of German I learnt in high school.
On a few occasions I was listening to a conversation in Dutch and would then contribute something in English, without thinking, and what I said was relevant so I must have been able to understand enough to do that. My receptive language skills were definitely better than my productive skills, though! I also had a go at reading the newspaper and was able to get the gist of the story.
What this reinforced to me was the usefulness of an understanding of register probabilities for understanding language (particularly foreign language). In the case of the newspaper in particular, I could make predictions about the likely structure and content of the language, particularly in the first paragraph. (The pictures also helped.) Once I had picked out the most easily recognisable information I could ask my informant (thanks sweetie!) what the other bits meant, and that way I could learn something about clause structure and clause relations in Dutch without making anyone go through it word-by-word for me.
In the case of conversations, I think it was always when they were talking about something that we had done, or something that had happened while we were there, so I was relying on an element of shared recent history and picking up on the words I already knew in relation to that event. So now I have some experience and confidence to pick up a bit more Dutch - I just have to keep practising...
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