![]() Most of you are probably aware that Dutch and German are very similar in many ways, but are also very different in others. So after a month in the country, the NAM sent me off to a two week crash course in conversational Dutch. Although the business language of Shell International and most of the 300 or so Shell companies is English, I spent the first of the three years working for the NAM (not Viet Nam but Nederlands Aardolie Maatschappij - translation Dutch Oil Company) where the business language is Dutch. Forgot it that is until in early 1996 I took a three year assignment with Shell in the Netherlands. He also let me be one of his graders, which gave me a bit of spending money.Īfter graduation in 1963, I did not have cause to use German and promptly forgot it. ![]() I told him I didn't want to do that so the next year he put me in third year German with half a dozen German majors in which we read works by Goethe, Lessing and Schiller. I did very well the first year so my prof, the head of the German department, tried to convince me to switch my major from mechanical engineering to German, especially since at that time my German grades were much better than my engineering grades. I studied German while going to Rice University in the early 1960s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |