The Netherlands is an easy country to have prejudices on.
For instance that we wear wooden shoes and live in windmills.
And off course that we are all drug addicts.

Here is a movie to prove you wrong about the last thing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPsFIsxM3w

Especially the part when you hear "everything is out of control, it's anarchy"! Great little movie.

I love this movie! Especially the end, Amsterdam is beautiful!

The answer on youtube from O'Reilly is brilliant too He tries to say that Dutch people have other statistics because there are so little people

Another prejudice people have about Holland: It's always raining.
And I'm starting to think they're right! The weather is horrible lately...

Well I come from India and there are many prejudices about India.

First, everyone in India is a hungry and poor. We don't have basic facilities. Well you are wrong. India is quite developed. The fact that people from other countries have not seen such things there and so they can not see beyond poverty and malnutrition. India has a lot of positives to show. Statistics and photos of this can be found anywhere online so I am not posting it.

Second, Indians don't know how to speak English. Its not that Indians don't know how to speak English. We have an accent. A very peculiar one. I mean, doesn't every place have a different way of speaking English. We know that English originated in the United Kingdom. So I presume they are the ones who are supposed to know how to speak English. Well then why do we say," Hey, You have a British accent." Accent is something totally different from knowing the language.


Ok, so before I get all hyper about other things. I will stop.

I must say, interesting thread.

About the first of India: being hungry and poor. I think you're right and a lot of people still think that, but I also believe that image is changing more and more and people are seeing it as an upcoming and quickly developing country.
About the second: I thought you guys speak very well English! Yeah with an accent, but who doesn't (maybe the Dutch well not that much and particular as french or german for example. ) But I thought there are a lot of services in India (like call centres) which are directed to english speaking people in other coutnries. So thats why I think and had the image people speak it like a second language in India! Is that true?

I never thought of Indians that they didn't know how to speak English. I think that most of the people for who English is a second language speak with some form of an accent. That does not mean that you don't control the language.
I never thought that everybody in India is poor aswell. I can understand why people would have such a view on that but I think that Steffy is right and that the Indian image is rapidly changing into the image of a country with a quickly developing economy and lots of hard-working smart people. But I don't think such an image change can happen overnight and that many people who haven't noticed these changes are from the point of view that there are lots of poor and hungry people.

And I think with India, there is a difference in people who are interested in thing slike world politics, International Relation, traveling etc, because they know India is developing great.

But people who are not that much interested in world affairs, probably still have the image it's a poor developing country! So I think you're right for some people. I hope the group that knows the image India is developing very quickly is increasing, it must be weird to life in a country of which people think it's bad to life there.

First of all I am glad that India's image is changing. It has to.
Also, English is, as you said, a second language to all of us. We learn our regional language first and then schools teach English. Parents rarely teach their children English. They teach them their local language first, so that the child can relate to their homeland. I know its difficult to understand but that's the way India works.
I agree with both of you that the image cannot change rapidly and that image varies from person to person depending on what background you come from and what are your interests.

That's really cool, that you have English at school. We learn in Dutch, I think that's a pity. It would be really good to be better in English I guess!!

But tell me about the languages in India, I never quite understand it.. Each region has a different language? And can you understand each others languages or is the difference to large?

India has 26 states. There are a lot more languages than that. Basically people in India understand their regional language, English and Hindi to a great extent. People from one part of the country generally don't know the regional language of the other parts. In that case they try to find a common language and then communicate. Its all too complicated. Apart from the huge number of languages, there are also different ways of speaking it. Dialects per language is also a major thing.
Still we manage. Somehow.

Wow I never realized that. We all speak Dutch, and that's it . We have some dialects (which are hard to understand) but there are not that many people who speak their dialect. But yeah, Holland is probably as small as a really tiny region in India haha