I am Japanese, but having lived for 10 years in my youth in Geneva, Switzerland, I speak English and French fluently, and Spanish quite well.

Attending an international school, I also learned words from friends from all over the world, like Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Sweden. And because they all said I pronounced these words perfectly, I believed that language would never be a problem in my life.

However, arriving in Holland for the first time when close to 30, I felt a huge culture shock. The Dutch language sounded like the weirdest thing on Earth!

Looking back, I was probably just too desperate to learn the language.

After all, I had just left a challenging but heavy job opening international routes for a Japanese airline and had come to Holland to marry a Dutchman.

I felt that Holland was where I would be buried and where I had to succeed in my career again, and that pressure made the language seem like a huge hurdle.

Well, time proved that such pressure had no grounds because I am still moving from one country to another. But at that time, I took my situation quite seriously.

Anyway, people learning French often complain that the French "r" and "v" are hard to pronounce as they put a lot of strain on the throat.

Well, I would say that the Dutch "g" and some "ch" sounds can only be pronounced by foreigners when they have a throat disease!

If you think I'm joking, get the next Dutch person you meet to pronounce gezellig for you, a word meaning cozy that you will use quite often if you live here.

And take the "ch."

The first time my husband and I moved here, it was the bubble years and hard to buy a house. So we settled in an apartment in Schalkwijk in the city of Haarlem.

I was then commuting to Amsterdam by public transport, but because it was such a difficult name to pronounce (again ask the nearest Dutch person), for two years, I carried with me a note with "Schalkwijk" written on it to show the bus driver as if I was a 5-year-old.

For seven years I made a huge effort to learn, attending a Dutch school in the evenings while working at an advertising agency. But right before I was entitled to take the Staatsexamen (official state exam), I moved back to Japan for my husband's job, so my Dutch never really became perfect.

But there is a funny twist to this story.

Back in Japan in 2001, I found a job as a journalist at The Japan Times, which I really enjoyed for seven years.

And I will never forget one day in 2003, when a British editor colleague looked at me in surprise and said, "You know, it may sound strange, and I don't know how that can be, but you talk like a Dutch person!" (He didn't know that I was married to a Dutchman).

Apart from the strange accent, the Dutch put words in odd orders and their way of counting is funny, similar reasons for Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara's criticism of the French.

Such peculiarities can influence one's language.

But what shocked me most was that English, which I had spoken for 30 years, was influenced by a language I wasn't even fluent in.

You really can't mess with the Dutch!