I'll never learn this bloody language

I've living in Amsterdam for two and half months now, and still I'm very far behind in knowledge of the language.

At first, I thought "Easy, as I already know a foreign language, just learn a few words and the basics are there". WRONG. Building a large vocabulary is indispensable, and it takes time and patience.

What I am doing is try to read a lot, with a dictionary on one side, in order to build a large vocabulary. This worked for English, so it should work now. Yet, getting to the point when the general sense of one sentence is clear even when some (many) words are unknown took a long time. And, still, my gaps in vocabulary are abysmal.

Reading and writing...well, I never practise these. Theoretically, I have a lesson book for that. Practically, I dedicate too ittle ltime to it. And I never speak Dutch, because most of my colleagues are not Dutch, and the ones who are know English very well. But, most important of all, sometimes I did try to speak Dutch. The problem was, they understood me, so they replied in Dutch. And I couldn't understand one word.

This leads to the lowest point: understanding spoken language. Every morning, Radio 1 wakes me up. The speakers are very good, they have a clear pronumnciation. So, I understand some words and, at times, even what some sentences mean. But not being able to understand most of it is frustrating.
Listening to the radio makes me believe "Hey, now I really understand!". Then, frustration ensues when real-life people actually talk to me. As soon as the conversation becomes more complex than "Goede morgen", "dank u wel" and "alstublieft", my reaction is always a perplexed face and a few words in English, begging the other to repeat in English...

I realise I will never learn Dutch when I think about all the irregularities, and all the words with different meanings. "Waar" means "true" and "where", "weer" means "again" and "weather", "zijn" means "to be" and "his"... But then, I think that Italian uses the same word for "time" and "weather", and suddenly I forgive Dutch people for speaking Dutch.