[com]

'Thanks', and 'please', are used in Dutch only when there is much to thank for (saving someones life, or at least possessions or the like). While in English they are part of almost any question or exchange, no matter how trivial.

As something like a native English speaker I was surprised how often people in Dutch say please and thank you in the Netherlands! (Flanders is of course a different cultural ball-game with politeness rules that remind me of German or French)

The informal would-you-mind-please word is "alsjeblieft" and it is normally used in any interaction with a child or someone in a shop, or even friends of whom you're asking a favour.

And while the informal thank words "dank je wel", "bedankt", "dank je" and "dank" are slightly less used than in much of the English-speaking world, they're still used for lots of stuff that is rather more trivial than saving someone's life. And seem always to be used after asking someone to do something like move their bag off a seat in a packed train... ;-)

And the Dutch certainly say informal hello's - with a slightly smaller bewildering array of sound-words than their goodbyes - with a lot more polite abandon than you'd find in urban English-speaking societies.

I suspect there's a kind of politeness-blindness working here: cultural norms and paradigms are fairly invisible once you're embedded into a society. Once you move, like wybo, the differences snap into focus.