The biggest problem for Dutch-learners whose native language is English: the Dutch have excellent English! Until your Dutch is very fluent and mistake-free most Dutch people will be unwilling to speak Dutch to you, and will simply switch to English. This isn't nastiness, it's just that a stranger has better things to do with their day than listen to your slow, ungrammatical broken language!
This kind of problem affects all English native speakers actually. When I speak Chinese with a bilingual Chinese person, sometimes just hesitating over one word is enough to make them switch to English. But luckily for me the vast majority of Chinese native speakers have little or no English. This is not so in the Netherlands, where speaking English + Dutch is as natural as having two legs.
