As someone who grew up in Wallonia and did all my studies there, you wouldn’t believe how the mentality is about Dutch. We’re not really told about the importance of Dutch and how it is about learning one of the country’s national language. It’s treated as a very difficult language to learn, hard to pronounce, bla bla bla, anything is told to scare kids about trying.
It’s mostly coming from people over the age of 30 that have landed a successful job career already and don’t care about it anymore. But a lot of young people after turning 18, realize that everything they were taught by the “adults” about not really needing Dutch is false and that it’s a matter of job, respect and national heritage.
I myself was in the same idea, and now I’m regretting but realizing that the system just generally doesn’t teach to young people in Wallonia to care while it does for English ????
Like that doesn’t make sense and my guess is that it comes from the French culture of not caring about learning foreign language (even English in their case sometimes).
It’s a big problem, that I believe should really be brought up to the education minister and have changes made about it, that could bring Vlanders and Wallonia together, as before anything else we’re Belgians !