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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The question I have for you at this point of our journey together is, “What is your genius?”
_{Attributed (maybe falsely) to Einstein.}

Let me lay out the background for my nightmare. I am an Australian living in Netherlands, all through my life I was terrible at learning new language. My father and mother were immigrants to Australia and although they spoke functional English, my father found it quite difficult. I remember being slightly ashamed and embarrassed about that, something that I now later regret!

So, some might call it karma, now I find myself in a similar situation. I am in a foreign country where Dutch is not my native language, but something that I struggle with constantly. Ik doen mijn beste, maar ik vind talen veel moeilijk om te leren (I do my best, but I find it really hard to learn languages). I guess we are all better at certain things, and definitely languages is the tree to my fish brain! In many ways, I take after my father, abstract thought is relatively easy and calming, languages are quite confronting!

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We have chosen for our children to go to Dutch schools, although we (the parents) are fish out of water, we are doing our best to integrate and we want our children to grow up as fully interacting members of the society that they grow up in.

So roughly once every 3 or so months we (the parents) need to do the voorlezen for the whole class, where the parents come in and read stories for the children in the class. My wife does this pretty well, she had studied languages before in university, whilst I studied less useful things!

Today was one of these days, and not that the older child is graduating up to the next class the last for a little while (at least until the younger one hits this age). I am happy speaking in English in front of groups of people (just not being in a group) and my career is based around being on stage in front of many people, so I know how to handle stage fright. But, sitting down to read fairy tales in Dutch to a group of 4-6 year olds, this gets my heart pumping fast!

Just to paint a picture of me reading. In Dutch, when I'm reading out loud, I read like a 8 year old. I read word by word, with no ability to see ahead in the sentences. So it comes out a bit stilted and sometimes mispronounced. Occasionally, there are words that I don't understand, but I sound them out anyway!

So the selection today, was the "King with No Clothes", a short story about bullying and another about fishes hiding in the sea. It was seriously the longest half hour of my life (apart from all the other voorlezens!).

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In the end I managed, there were no casualties apart from my pride and dignity! The kids seemed to understand my mangled Dutch, and my child seemed proud of me. In the end, I only hope that my daughter is a more forgiving child than I was and isn't too ashamed of her father that speaks funny Dutch!