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by eldina 5362 days ago
Still a little odd, as the Dutch are generally considered to be the best non-native speakers of English in Europe.
3 comments

This comment will probably never be read, but nevertheless ...

I am a Frenchman living in the Netherlands. And you are both correct and incorrect ...

The Dutch are probably among the most fluent non-native English speakers in Europe, BUT, they speak for most of them a "good enough" English, and not at all a perfect English.

This usually materializes even more when they are writing. There is even several books (usually written by Dutch authors themselves) making fun of "dutchisms".

That said, I don't necessarily consider myself better ... Simply, I do other kind of mistakes, so their mistakes usually strike me more than my own mistakes of course, but mistakes of other French speakers as well

Foton is spanish for Photon, I guess it's the same way in Dutch. (It is)
I'd imagine Photon is spelt Foton in pretty much any phonetic language in the world (or as they would say fonetic lol)
You mean fonetik?
Haha yes, pardon me.
While most of the Dutch people I've heard speak did so with perfectly fluent English (and American accents -- thank you, Hollywood), you're unwittingly assuming he's relatively young -- my understanding is that, not surprisingly, levels of English fluency drop off somewhat rapidly with age in the current Dutch population.
He got his phd in 2000, so I assumed he was reasonably young :)