‘It’s worth investing some time in learning Dutch’

“1 April will be my 20-year anniversary of working for TU Delft. I started in 2002 as a lecturer for communication skills and went on to be the coordinator of that section for another six years. Eight years ago I became the Director of the Centre for Languages and Academic Skills.

We work for the whole university so all students, PhDs and even faculty by providing education or classes in communication skills and languages. Communication skills means things like academic writing, presentation skills, debating and even meeting skills. We just added something new which is teamwork skills. There are also language courses for people at TU Delft who want to learn Dutch. For example, international master’s students come here in big numbers and they are here for two years. For a lot of them it’s really worth investing some time in learning the language to be able to integrate a bit more, to be able to socialise with their friends or even just to do shopping more easily.

We also provide courses to improve English skills, courses for PhDs on writing dissertations, writing scientific articles in English or presenting scientific research. We even have Spanish courses. Quite a few students go to Spanish speaking countries for a minor or an internship or to work in global development and they want to be able to communicate with the local people. And there’s Italian for students who want to be able to work or study there.

‘We learned a lot from being online’

We’re so glad to be coming out of these last two years of online classes. We’re proud that we managed, we made the best of it, but it wasn’t nice. Especially not for things like learning presentation skills or language acquisition, for courses like English pronunciation where you really want to be able to work face to face, not on a screen. We’re really happy that we can do on-campus education again. But we also learned a lot from being online. For instance, we did courses on online presentation skills with things you wouldn’t learn in a classroom like how to work with slides online and present in front of a camera.

We’ve been wanting to have a short introductory Dutch course for a long time. Over the last three years we managed to develop one and it’s now a six-week online course that anyone can participate in, both within and outside of the TU Delft community. It’s for people who want to come to Delft or are thinking about it, and want to know a bit more about the language, the culture and how TU Delft works, and it’s free. It requires about eight to ten hours of work a week to acquire what you need to be at a basic level of Dutch, but it will really pay off for people who do it. They can have conversations and will feel much more comfortable coming to Delft because they will recognise things, and see the campus or places in the city. We use the Delft Method which is special. It’s a nice method of learning a language because it was originally based on how children learn a language from a very young age. It’s not just from a book or from a list of words, it’s conversation all the time.

TU Delft is a wonderful place of cooperation and inspiration, there’s a lot of good energy here. We are well embedded within the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and there is a nice team spirit in the institute. We work across the whole of TU Delft so we’re not in the same building all of the time but when we’re together it is really nice. People are very dedicated to what they do.

And so many students come here who are very motivated, interested and quite smart and they are a joy to work with. After 20 years, and hopefully a lot more, I still feel that I learn as much from my students as my students learn from me which is wonderful.”

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Heather Montague / Freelance writer