There’s nothing worse than watching someone squander a great opportunity, and one little moron just set a new low in terms of pissing away one’s natural potential: This child just wasted his critical period of language acquisition on Dutch.
Wow—this kid fucked up big-time!
Nine-year-old Pieter Visser is days away from the end of the developmental window in which his brain exhibits increased aptitude for picking up language, but, maddeningly, all the pint-sized dumbfuck has to show for it is a borderline useless fluency in some bronze-medal Low Franconian bullshit with barely enough speakers to fill a telephone booth. The neuroplasticity of Pieter’s young mind could have been a free ticket to any number of useful tongues, but he went ahead and blew it on Dutch, a language that somehow manages to sound worse than German while also having about as much practical application as fucking Klingon. Imagine if someone offered to buy you any car you wanted, and you picked a smashed-up ‘96 Ford Taurus that couldn’t be reliably driven in everyday traffic—that’d still be a smarter choice than voluntarily learning a language as pointless as Dutch.
To be clear, we’re not saying that the only languages worth learning are the billion-speaker big hitters like English and Mandarin Chinese, but Pieter could have at least used his critical period to effortlessly pick up a language with some kind of fun or exciting utility. He could have learned French and gotten really into fine cooking and pastry-making for instance, or maybe he could have learned Japanese and opened himself up to a ton of amazing video games that never received localizations. Hell, it probably would have been worth learning Polish purely on the strength of getting to read Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher novels as they were originally written, but did Pieter think that far? Nope! He just heard the people around him during this critical window of cognitive development speaking some boring-ass language and thought “I guess that’s good enough for me!” in Dutch.
Hey Pieter, maybe you’ll understand this: Je bent een idioot!
While Pieter is still totally capable of learning some better languages than Dutch, he’s unfortunately pretty much blown his wad at this point in terms of seizing on his prime development window, as his peak years for recognizing and internalizing new phonological patterns are already in the rearview. From here on out he’s gonna have to slog through years of academic courses or endless DuoLingo quizzes if he wants even rudimentary communication with anyone beyond the paltry 30 million Dutch speakers out there, and he could have gotten a better result for a fraction of the effort if he’d only had the sense to start earlier. The smart move would’ve been to use his one freebie language on a complicated but useful one, and then, after, if he still felt the bizarre need to learn Dutch for whatever reason, he could’ve always circled back and taken it on.
God, what a waste.
Imagine having all that glorious neuroplasticity to work with and then earnestly wanting to use it on learning Dutch. It’s nuts! Nonetheless, we hope that Pieter is at peace with his batshit decision, because it’s too late to do anything about it now.
