how to pronounce numbers

[Thomas Okken]

(06-26-2018 12:19 PM)grsbanks Wrote:  I have friends in a small village called Beert, between Pepingen and Halle just SW of Brussels. The son is a lawyer and he got some work in (I think, this is going back a few years) 's Hertogenbosch. He was extremely self-conscious about speaking Dutch and admitted that he would have been embarrassed by his accent. Even knowing that he was Belgian and "nederlandstalig" his Dutch colleagues always spoke English to him. Never Dutch. I asked why that was and they told me it was actually commonplace for Vlamingen and Nederlanders to refuse to speak Dutch together.

A small village, within walking distance of Wallonia? I could imagine how people even in Den Bosch might have trouble keeping up with his dialect. And the situation is not symmetrical, since all Flemings, no matter where they live, get exposed to Standard Dutch on TV every day.

But speaking of Standard Dutch, listen to the segment that starts at 1:15 in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDfokCMBKnw&t=75
That's an announcer on VRT één, which is a station that Dutch people can usually understand just fine. While I understand most of what she says, some words zip right past me. I'd probably get used to it fairly quickly, but any thicker and I can see Dutch people thinking, screw this, let's just switch to English instead.

EDIT: Forgot my counterpoint, which is that I've found people in the parts of Flanders where I've been, namely, Antwerp and some towns up north, to be perfectly understandable. They have an accent, which Dutch people (including me) tend to find charming, but their Dutch is perfectly understandable, the difference being similar to the difference between BBC English and Standard American English.