Languages make me feel at home
I'm back in Brussels after spending a month in Italy to visit my parents and as soon as I was on the plane and heard the pilot surprisingly giving announcements also in Italian with a very light Flemish accent (the company was Brussels Airlines and usually nothing is in Italian even if for sure 90% of the passengers from/to Italy are Italians) I thought about how languages give me emotions.
The mess that schools (or bad teachers in general) can do
I want to insist on speaking about Dutch, because it was a challenge. In my mind, I link it to German, which was a failure. I studied it three years at school, which messed up everything in my mind. I gave up doing anything about it even alone with the hope of ending up FORGETTING EVERYTHING I had learnt. This hasn't happened for a long time and "the bad vibes of German" daunted me for years.
Now? Thanks to my success at learning Dutch I'm considering it again
Social pressure works haha...
Moreover, because of the status of Dutch in Belgium and the "moral suasion" Flemings do all year round, well, being able to talk to them felt like gaining more score points than doing the same in French, which was also naturally easier thanks to its proximity to Italian.
I've struggled a lot to speak it fluently anyway - and it isn't as fluent as my French yet -, but every small step ahead felt like "wow". Also, I've had totally different experiences with Dutch-speaking Belgians here compared to their French-speaking counterparts
Language is always a tool of integration
I want to integrate into Belgium. I'll be an immigrant forever and the DNA appearing from my face (and my height in some areas?) of course will always say "Hey, there's some Mediterranean blood here". Still, even if there's more cultural distance between us and them, I have had more experiences where I got actually personally closer to them than the others, on average - contradicting all the prejudices, then I've realised several other foreigners had the same experiences. That's what I want. Not chitchatting about superficial stuff for ages and still not knowing someone actually.
Speaking Dutch was the key to letting them open up this much, imho, or at least one of the reasons
Surprise test: passed
When I got to Brussels airport on Wednesday and I was waiting for my luggage at the belt, I was approached by a sir who asked me if I was willing to answer some questions about my satisfaction of the airport. I was approached directly in Dutch, I answered in Dutch and the conversation went on until the end without the need for a single word in English.
These "surprise tests" remind me I can sort of feel at home here. And this was only the last of a series of other episodes: a podcast festival I went to last year (where I'm pretty sure I was the only non-Flemish participant) and two more interviews I joined about my experiences as a podcast listener :D
When I can afford following this, when I can laugh with the others when they make references to some news episode or so, when I catch the word-puns. I feel integrated and more at my home of choice.