He went to the Sint Stevens-Woluwe elementary school at Sint-Stevens-Woluwe in Belgium, before attending, from 1972, the Lyceum Saint George's English School at Rome in Italy and from 1975 until 1980 the Athenaeum Bernardinuscollege in what became his hometown of Heerlen.
Aside from his native languages Limburgish and Dutch, Timmermans is fluent in Italian, Russian, French, German, and English [REF].