You are a psychologist, so nothing in this volume will surprise you as science. What is worth reading is the application: what spacing, retrieval, interleaving and habit design look like specifically for an adult professional learning Dutch while working in English, in a country whose people switch to English to be kind.
Forgetting is not a defect in your study method; it is the default behaviour of memory, and it is steepest in the first forty-eight hours. Every design decision in this library follows from that single fact: short sessions, spaced returns, retrieval instead of review, and a cap of fourteen cards so that tomorrow still happens.
The most robust finding in the learning literature is also the least intuitive: producing an answer strengthens memory far more than re-encountering it, and the method that feels most productive — highlighting, rereading, watching — is the weakest. You will therefore experience the effective method as the inefficient one. Expect that, and judge your study by what comes out of your mouth at a counter, not by how smooth the session felt.
Dutch is a comparatively easy language for an English speaker and a comparatively hard language to practise, because the country is fluent in your language. The obstacles are mostly environmental rather than linguistic — which is good news, because environments can be redesigned.
Eight statements. Tap the ones that are true this month. The reading underneath is not a score — it is a diagnosis with one thing to change.
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Between B1 and C1 the subjective rate of progress collapses. Nothing has gone wrong: early gains are visible because they change what you can do at all, and later gains are invisible because they change how well you do things you could already do. This is where most adults stop — not from difficulty, but from the absence of feedback.
Not the ideal week — the week you will still do in a bad month. Set the daily minutes and the days, and the plan below is what that actually buys you.
You know the mechanism professionally: avoidance reduces anxiety in the short term and maintains it in the long term. Language avoidance is unusually well camouflaged, because switching to English is polite, efficient and rewarded by everyone in the room. That is precisely what makes it worth naming as avoidance.
Build the ladder the way you would build one for a client: graded, repeated, with the step held until the anxiety drops rather than until it disappears. And drop the private standard that your Dutch must be good before you are allowed to use it — that standard is the avoidance, wearing professional clothes.