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Learning Dutch For English Speakers

Learning Dutch? If you go by the percentages, you should have an easy time . After all, it’s part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, making it closely related to English.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, so don’t underestimate the learning curve. While Dutch shares similarities with English, it’s not quite as close to it as Spanish is. As such, be vigilant about putting in the time and effort necessary if you want to reap the rewards.

Travel To Dutch-Speaking Countries

Dutch is primarily spoken in the Netherlands, with somewhat wide usage in parts of Belgium and the former Dutch colonies. If you’re traveling to the Netherlands, you can actually get away with zero Dutch, as locals tend to be active at learning other languages. English, in particular, is a compulsory subject on all levels of the secondary education system, with courses also taught at higher grade levels in some elementary schools. An estimated 85% of native Dutch speakers also know English as a second language. Still, if you want to speak on the level as the local folks or if you want to do serious business in the Netherlands, learning the native language can only help.

Speaking Dutch

As a people, the Dutch don’t usually expect foreigners to speak their language, especially in the big cities. If you strike up a conversation with someone, they’ll usually answer you in English if they detect you have even moderate difficulty with their language. When you want to practice your Dutch with locals, you have to be very explicit — tell them beforehand you want them to speak to you in Dutch. Otherwise, they’ll just switch to English to ease up the conversational struggle.

In less “international” Dutch cities like Rotterdam, you’ll have a lot more opportunities for practice, since many locals will talk to you in Dutch if you open a conversation in their native language. If you’re looking for a full-proof way to practice your Dutch, talk to the older people you come across, instead. A lot of the older individuals either don’t care much for practicing their English or don’t know much English, so they’ll likely respond to you in Dutch.

Similarities with English

Dutch shares many similarities with English, which should help make learning the language easier. For instance, it uses the same Latin alphabet as English, so there’s no need to memorize a new alphabet from the ground up.

Sound systems are similar, too, making it easy to understand and utter Dutch syllables. In fact, Dutch is one of the few languages that native English speakers can adopt the accents of a first-language speaker, since even the stress and intonation patterns are the same. Do note that this won’t happen overnight — the pronunciations will take a lot of getting used to. Over time, though, you’ll notice how much easier it will be to assume a regular Dutch accent.

Dutch grammar also follows the same subject-verb-object structure in English, although the positioning of adverbials are different. As such, your biggest problems on this end will be awkward phrasings that result from the wrong order of phrases. Don’t take this lightly — a lot of Dutch learners cite this as their biggest hurdle.

The verb system in Dutch also mirrors the English language closely. It has similar verb tenses and is also uninflected. Do note that there’s a lack of correspondence between the tenses in the two languages, so don’t expect to apply the same rules of verb use you’ve learned in English.

A large amount of cognates exist between Dutch and English, apart from Dutch owning plenty of common Germanic and Romance vocabulary. As such, you might actually be able to make out some Dutch phrases even without studying the language — something that will, undoubtedly, help speed up your progress, as far as memorizing vocabulary is concerned.

Potential Sticking Points

The biggest challenge you will face at the beginning is pronunciation. Dutch pronunciation is so different from English, even if their stress, intonation and sound systems are quite similar. Chances are, you’ll have an ugly accent when you first start, especially when using those back-of-the-throat sounds so common in the language.

Sounds like “sch,” “g” and “ui” are notable sources of challenge, especially when piled together in a single long word. Some of the vowel sounds (both short vowels like “oe” and long vowels like “ee”), diphthongs (“eeuw,” “au,” “ou,” “ieuw” and more) and consonant sounds (like “sj” and “ch”) can also present a challenge.

Once you get the pronunciation to a serviceable level, the next big challenge will come with word order. While Dutch grammar shares many things in common with English, word order, especially with adverbials, follows different rules. Messing up on word order can still get you understood, but it will be very awkward and might even cause some miscommunication. When you don’t know how to form a sentence, dig into your memory for the actual guidelines in the target language, rather than defaulting to the format you’re familiar with in English — it won’t translate well.

Dutch grammar is also notorious for being lax on the rules. There are just way too many exceptions to the standard rules of the language. Don’t get frustrated, too — you’ll pick them all up over time.

Spelling in Dutch is, generally, simple and consistent with its rules, considerably more so than English. That is, if you already know all the vowels, diphthongs and consonants. Otherwise, sentences will look particularly strange, which can be daunting to newbies.

A Few Last Words

When learning Dutch, it usually helps to start out getting over the hurdles presented by the unusual pronunciations. If your Dutch learning software has a basic pronunciation module, try playing around with that. You can also find Dutch videos on YouTube and try parroting the things people on the videos say. No need to figure out what they’re saying — just get comfortable with the way things are pronounced in the target language.

Once you’re at ease with Dutch pronunciations, you’ve gotten over one of the most frustrating hurdles. From there, you should be able to do your lessons without serious stumbles.

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