Daedalus

That's difficult. It just all feels natural to me, but can you give some examples on what you're stuck on, maybe I can give you some pointers. There's an article on Wikipedia, titled Subject-verb-object, which includes this interesting bit:

Ah yes, the letter ij. Officially it shares its place in the alphabet with the letter y (like in telephone listings), but they're really not the same. Even though it is spelled using both the i and j together, it must be considered a single letter, which becomes apparent when it's capitalised, for example in the name of the largest lake in he Netherlands, the IJsselmeer. As for the pronunciation, I'd say it's somewhat a mix between the English A and I. Note that there also exists the ei, which is pronounced very similar, though there is a subtle difference. The ij is often called the 'long ij' and the ei then is called the 'short ei'. I would say the ei is pronounced a tiny bit 'flatter' than the ij. Ask someone to say the words hij and hei and try to hear the difference. The ei is not a single letter like the ij is, for example in the name of the city Eindhoven, you can see only the e is capitalised. And yes, there are notable differences in the pronunciation in various dialects. Some may sound rounder (more like the English I) and some sound way flatter (like a short e as in 'help').

I think that's just a translation. The Dutch word werkwoord literally translated is 'work word', but the true translation is just 'verb'. We only divide verbs in the two categories weak and strong verbs. Strong verbs 'change' when used in past tense, while weak verbs stay fairly the same. For example, the verb blijven, meaning 'to stay', in past tense is bleven. You see it loses the ij, so this is a strong verb. And the verb werken (to work) in past tense is werkten, which is hardly different, so this is a weak verb.

Yes, that's true. Most often, you won't really notice it, but there are some areas where it is difficult to understand.

Note that in recent decades, a lot of the female forms have gone. Journalist, for example is used for both male and female journalists, same with fotograaf, schilder, bakker and muzikant. On the other hand, I noticed you left out the female form of teacher, which is lerares.

Yes, the root word is 'de meid' (which of course is feminine, so it's a 'de'-word), but the meaning is slightly different. Meid can mean 'maid', as in 'room maid', but it's also used to signify the girl is more grown up. Sure, feel free to contact me, I'm interested in your progress. But I'm sure your Dutch is much better than my Spanish

Thanks for this list. As a native speaker, I just know when to use de or het, and it's hard to explain why. This helps people learning Dutch a lot.

Yes, Southern speech is soft like that. Southern is generally considered to be 'under the rivers'; if you look at a map of the Netherlands, you can see a row of rivers running across the country which separate the South from the rest of the country. There still are differences in the various provinces though, but especially Brabant and Limburg are known to have softer speech. It's also much closer to Flemish. Oh, and on topic, I kept meaning to add that Tulpen uit Amsterdam originally is a German song, not Dutch

Small typo there, it's spelled 'meisje'. Just to clarify: 'meisje', meaning 'girl' is linguistically speaking neutral gender, because it is a diminutive word. All diminutive words are neutral, and therefore always are het words. Just like: de hond / het hondje. Notice diminutive words end in -je (sometimes -tje, depending on pronunciation).

There certainly are differences. I don't know about spelling, but Flemish uses some grammatical constructions you don't hear in Netherlands Dutch. I think though, you should be fine learning Dutch and then adapting once you get to Belgium. Actually, it is similarly true in England. I just learnt plain English in school, but now I live in North England, I do notice differences in speech. But I adapt automatically, just stay in frequent touch with the local population and you'll pick it up.

I understand what you mean, Jay. It just sounds weird. It doesn't sound as poetic as English songs. And when musicians do try to be poetic, it's still weird, people call it pretentious and try to find everything that's wrong with it (example: by Abel). And I must say, now that I'm living in the UK for nearly two years, whenever I'm back in The Netherlands, the language as a whole just sounds a bit weird. Not as subtle or flowing. Tulpen uit Amsterdam is a classic and a tourist favourite of course Do you still dislike it when it's played on street organs, without the lyrics? Btw Trellum, that song I posted in this reply is what Dutch from the South of the Netherlands sounds like. There's still different accents in that, but you can mainly tell by the way the letter 'G' is spoken, much softer than in the North.

Feel free to start a small talk topic in here if you want. It would be a good thing to have, I think, as you'd probably use it the most in everyday life.

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed your time and you managed alright with Dutch so far. Keep us updated

Yes, I think that might be true, although it differs from person to person. But I do think Dutch people are more direct than British. Especially if they're originally from Amsterdam. But it's not always meant rude, so try not to feel strange about it. I think it's considered more rude, sneaky and shrewd when people are not direct when insulting someone. Think of like in films bad guys say something like: "it would be a real shame if something would happen to your wife." Well, that's obviously threatening, but not direct at all. So we think that's mean. At least if they'd say "I'll kill your wife for this," they're being honest about their intentions

That's a good one. It can be difficult to come up with these though. I've got another one. If you're ever in a Dutch speaking place, and someone suddenly shouts something about 'beer', don't get too excited about the prospect of having a glass of the cool, alcoholic beverage; they're likely just warning you that there's a bear on the loose.

Oh, that's interesting. In Dutch it's possible to have 'I' first, it's just considered impolite. Interesting it is grammatically incorrect in English.

Of course it's obvious when you're being polite (as you should) and put yourself as the last subject ("My friend and I..."), but when you turn it around, it feels more natural to use 'me': "Me and my friend...". For impolite people, would the correct way still be "I and my friend went to town"? Even though it feels wrong?

I've lived most my life in North Holland, so I'd say that's where I'm from. The kissing is mainly used in families or by really good friends, and it's very informal. You won't see people in businesses greet each other that way.

I think I did pretty well. I got a German text to read and I understood it well enough to answer the question right. I got a few languages to listen to and had to guess which one it was, I mistook Swedish for being Danish, but had the other ones right.

How well do you think you can understand languages that are closely related to your native language? For example, I am Dutch, and although I have had some German lessons in the past, I would not be able to speak it nowadays. But I still can read it well enough to understand. You can now play a 'game', based around this. You get to hear some spoken text and you read a foreign text and have to guess the language and what it's about. Try it now by clicking [this link]

When you first meet his parents, especially when you're a bit nervous about it, you can just shake hands, that's fine. Later, when you're more comfortable with them, you can go on to kissing. It's not really kissing, you just sort of touch cheeks and make the smack sound. In the Netherlands, you do this 3 times, first you move to the left, then right, then left again. That's your left, so you get the kiss on your right cheek first. But if you still feel weird doing that, you're fine to keep your distance. It depends on what weird comments his sister makes, but having two older brothers, I'm used to weird comments myself. For me at least the best way to deal with it is to go along with it. Laugh, make a comment yourself. If she's making the comments to try and make you feel awkward, by doing that you'll show her it's not working, and then she'll stop it eventually.

Oh yeah, 'if' certainly can have 2 sides as well. I think that 'if' signifies a condition that must be met before the rest of the sentence is true. So the outcome of somebody saying 'if' doesn't necessarily happen. "If it rains, I will take the bus," but what if it does not rain? 'Whether' feels to me more like 'regardless'. The outcome of the sentence is fixed. The person's mind is made up and nothing can change it. "Whether or not it rains, I will walk." You can use 'if' for contradicting conditions, but to me, it doesn't feel quite right: "If it rains or not..." I guess it's possible, but I can't help but think that 'whether' would be more suitable in that sentence. On a side note, as a programmer, I am used to working with many logic 'boolean' if-statements. You use if-statements to check for very specific program states or variables. These can be very extensive (for example, in a bounding box collision detection, you check if 4 specific conditions are true) or very simple, but you will never use it to check if a condition is either true or false, like you would with 'whether', simply because it doesn't make sense. Any given condition is always either true or false, so there's never any need to specifically check for it. So while the if-statement is heavily used in software, there's no such thing as a 'whether-statement'.

Not entirely, I think. 'Whether' has two arguments, usually opposites. "Whether it rains or not, I'm walking to town". 'If' can have just one argument: "If it rains, I'm taking the bus to town." And I suppose 'if' also can have more than two arguments: "If it is raining and there's a strong wind and the temperature is below 15 degrees C, I will take a taxi to town."

I can recognise various scripts, but only because I've seen them before, so in that sense I do 'know' them. I do not understand them though. Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese (especially Katakana), Korean, Egyptian hieroglyphs I think are usually easy to recognise; Chinese and Thai I've seen and might recognise, but can't really think of any particular character features now that for me makes the script. And then of course there's things like the Voynich manuscript which is fairly unique and recognisable.

I don't live there anymore, but I am a Dutch native. Dutch culture, I would say, is generally quite free, open, understanding and tolerant. There are of course exceptions, and these people tend to have the loudest mouths, so it may not always appear so free, but with the right people, there's little you can do wrong. We may not seem very polite, for example, in English, you would say "Can I have a cup of tea please?", in Dutch you simply say "Can I have a cup of tea?" That's very normal and is still polite. In our own way One thing I noticed when I came to the UK, when you're having a coffee or something to eat in an establishment in town (not all though, not in restaurants for example (except places like MacDonald's)), it is common in the Netherlands to bring empty glasses to the counter, and throw rubbish in the bins provided. Not so in the UK, and possibly in other countries, where you just leave everything on the table. That's considered rude in the Netherlands. As I said, not in all places, it's hard to define exactly where and where not, but if you're with natives, they should show you where it's appropriate. Here in the UK, I often hear when people are talking about the Netherlands that they think it's the cleanest place they've ever seen. I've heard somebody call Amsterdam the 'cleanest city'. While I do not think it's entirely true, it is fairly clean. I think that's because there are bins everywhere. here, I can sit on a public bench and don't see a bin anywhere, in the Netherlands, there should be a bin next to every bench. Although it is considered rude if you do not throw rubbish in the bins, people probably won't comment on it if you just throw stuff on the ground. The councils send out cleaning trucks regularly (especially Sunday mornings in Amsterdam) to keep the city as rubbish-free as possible. We all ride our bicycles, so there are bike lanes all over the country. Bicycles should not be used on pavements, that's for pedestrians only. Exceptions are when the public feels the council should've added a bike lane shortcut. You will of course find people riding their bicycles on pavements anyway (especially teenagers, lol), but most people will stay in the designated lanes. And speaking of traffic, with the exception of Amsterdam (although they're trying to enforce it now), when you're a pedestrian and you cross a road, if the light is red, you wait. I've noticed in the UK this is usually not the case, because "you can't get a ticket for it", but you can in the Netherlands. Except when it's late at night or you're in the middle of nowhere, but generally you wait for the light to turn green (push the button though, or it will always stay red). Pedestrian traffic lights are always across the road from you. If you're crossing a road and there's no traffic lights, but there is a zebra crossing, pedestrians have right of way. Cars have to stop if they see you want to cross the road. They don't always do this, especially when they see the pedestrian is foreign and may not know the rules, but they have to. What you do, you just pretend to put one foot on the crossing (often there's also a bike lane, so you can usually safely step on that) and observe if the oncoming car is slowing down. If it is, usually you can go ahead and cross. Some people will always be jerks and won't stop, so you should still be careful. Bicycles also have to stop for pedestrians, but you can't be sure of that at all, so the trick won't work here. There's usually not a lot of bikes anyway, so you can wait for them. I hope that helped a bit. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.