Late night language immersion

I am standing outside a building, in a town I hadn't heard of until 3 days ago, at 04:30 am on a weekday, having stood there for 2 hours already. How did I get here, and why? 

Well, it is my part-time job of ecology fieldwork, specifically focusing on bats, swifts and sparrows. To keep a long story short, whenever someone wants to do some sort of development or renovation (redoing a roof, rezoning an area, etc), they are legally required to see whether the area in question is being used by a protected species. My job is to check that by surveying the area during the active hours of a given species (they dictate the office hours). In doing the work, I've noticed that it has been a really useful tool for improving my Dutch.

It began with getting certified through following various courses. The courses were entirely in Dutch, and to grasp what was going on, I had to significantly expand my Dutch vocab. While I can barely string a coherent sentence together, I can easily list around 15 bat species. Where that scales on the CERF language levels, I do not know.

But onto the actual work. You do these inspections in groups of 2 or more. You're given a location, and the group has to communicate on how to arrange the carpool to get everyone there at the right time. Almost all of my colleagues are Dutch, and so this is done in Dutch. In and amongst getting there is checking the weerbericht, which is very important as the animals don't love the Dutch rain, either. If the weather is bad, the shift doesn't happen.

Once everyone is in the car and on their way to quite literally anywhere, there is, of course, some small talk and mingling. You either run into new people and introduce yourself (why you took the job, what you do, bitching about the work, etc) or you run into people you've worked with before, which usually just entails a more sophisticated bitching about the work. 

I've come to appreciate the difficulty of either trying to follow a conversation between multiple people, or trying to come up with a conversation ex-nihilo in a language you're not quite competent in. I can only imagine what that's like for people who experience this when they start a degree here and don't have a strong command of English.

By the end of the shift, I do feel the fatigue of having to interact in Dutch throughout the shift. It does make me think of the Dutch people here who perhaps feel a similar fatigue, having to navigate in English throughout the day. I've often heard that Dutch people appreciate being able to turn the English off when they're home. Having done it the other way around (navigating in Dutch through the night), I kinda get it.