DaBlink182

I love this idea! I've had Pen Pals before but it wasn't for the sake of learning a new language, so this is an interesting idea. Of course, like many said before, I don't really feel comfortable giving out my address, but E-mail is totally fine for me. I guess I could help people with Dutch, so if you feel like it, shoot me a message.

I used to study in a city close to two other countries and it was of vital importance to speak English fluently if you wanted to work anywhere, because I got a lot of encounters with people from other countries. So yes, speaking English, together with a good bit of German helped me get the job that I worked at for about 6 months before I moved back.

Hi there Sputniker! Awesome, my last study (the one that I unfortunately didn't finish) was to become a translator too! I'm 100% sure this forum will help you tremendously with your study. Best of luck and have fun!

I know there's a lot of hate towards Grammar Nazi's, but for some people, like myself, seeing a mistake is almost physically painful to read. It doesn't matter in what context it's written, wether it's an argument or an opinion, it just degrades the comment to a lower level, which is a shame in most cases, because the rest of the comment might be very well written. Oh well, I just hope that people understand that we're not always correcting you to feel better about ourselves, it's just something that we can't really help.

This is exactly what I'm experiencing as well. I use English on a daily basis too, but it doesn't increase my vocabulary that much. There are times when I'm reading an article and I come across a word that I'm unfamiliar with, but that doesn't happen very often. I guess I should read more articles that are difficult for me to understand.

Yes this happens to me all the time. Because I read and speak English every day through internet and friends from abroad, I find that I'll be saying a sentence in my native language that contains an English word. I usually don't even notice untill the person I'm speaking to says something about it. It's a pretty annoying habit, but I'm getting used to it more and more. It teaches me to think before I say something, which isn't such a bad thing to learn sometimes.

Oh this is so recognisable! This might be different for you, but whenever I have to read out loud in class, I get a little nervous and I try to focus on pronunciation, just like you do, which makes me forget all about what I'm actually reading too. However, I think that reading out loud by yourself makes it a lot easier to understand the text the first time you're reading it. For me, it takes away the nerves and I get to focus on my own mistakes without having to be embarrassed.

It's not so much that I care about how I talk, because unless I lived in an English speaking country for over 10 years, people would almost immediately hear that I'm not from there. My issue lies in the fact that, while I can easily maintain a conversation in English, I have a hard time finding an accurate translation to some words, which makes me feel stupid, which makes me panic, etc. Oh well, I guess it's just a matter of time before I have a larger vocabulary than I have now.

Oh man, necessary Every single time I have to write that horrible word, I look it up on google just to make sure I spelled it right. I just always seem to forget how to write it.

Never heard of this before but it sounds very reasonable. A friend of mine can't pronounce the rolling "R", it doesn't matter how I explain it to him, he doesn't seem to get it. But I'm sure there's a way for him to learn this. If he were to do tongue exercises, I think he'd be able to pronounce it with ease after some practice. Oh and another thing to add to this, for most people in my country, it's pretty difficult to pronounce "th". This often results in pronouncing "Cathedral" as "Catedral". We're just not used to making that sound with our tongue, so the only thing you can do is either practicing a lot or doing tongue exercises to get used to it more quickly.

Yea I was thinking the exact same thing. Prejudging someone based on an accent falls into the same category as using stereotypes to judge someone in my opinion. Sometimes it might be hard to look past stereotypes because of bad experiences with that language and culture, but it's best to just leave it and talk to them like you would talk to anyone.

No, not really. I live in The Netherlands and I've never met anyone who spoke just Spanish and nothing else. But I'm learning it for the future. I'm planning to move to America (North or South, haven't decided yet) and I know for sure that it'll come in handy, especially in South America, duh

Wow, thank you for this! I'm probably not at a level where I should be reading newspapers, since they're probably too difficult to understand, but I'll probably recognize some words and learn new ones by looking them up in my dictionary!

Oh man, I'm not proud to admit this, but some of the most common cursing words in Dutch are diseases. It's frowned upon, but most young people (from certain areas) curse with words like cancer all the time. It's horrible and a lot of people are disgusted by it, but it happens all the time. And besides the diseases (we use a lot of them as curse words) we pretty much curse with anything that's even remotely negative. Dutch sucks haha.

Well, I always wanted to travel through Central and South America and Spanish would help me tremendously on this journey, so that's one thing I'm planning on doing. This, however, might not be possible right away because it's expensive, so a nice vacation to Spain would be my second option.

I learned English when I was 4/5 years old I think. My dad had bought me a Gameboy Color with Pokemon and I slowly learned what some of those strange words meant. I've always been good with languages, so it wasn't difficult for me to improve my English pretty fast. It helped me a lot in high school, where I noticed that my English level was high enough for me to kick back, relax and still get high grades. Oh how I miss high school haha.

There are a lot of similarities between the two, which is why I'd recommend you to not study them at the same time. I suppose both languages have their difficulties and while I can't say for sure, I'm told a lot that Dutch grammar is quite difficult to learn, although it might look easier than German grammar. To conclude, I guess it's best for you to study the language you'd like to learn the most, first. Then, once you can hold a decent conversation in one of them, move to the other so that you won't get too confused. Because trust me, they're pretty confusing if you mix them together.

I don't think there's any language that's easy to learn. It just depends on what your mother tongue is and what you grew up with. For example, I'm Dutch, and Dutch is a lot like German. Because there are so many familiarities between them, it's a lot easier for me to learn German than it is for someone who doesn't speak a language that's kind of familiar. Same with what you grew up with. You said that Spanish is easy to learn because it's taught in high school and it's integrated in your culture. Same here with English. There are so many English and American TV-shows, movies and series that are broadcast here that it's difficult to not learn English

Thanks for the warm welcome! Pandadesign, yea Italian is pretty hard to learn, especially because neither Dutch nor English is much like it. I've been to Italy a few times and I love their culture and everything about it! Astdua, thank you Yea I'm really interested in all of those things too so I guess learning the language is just a way to learn more about the culture!

Well it really depends on what your goals are. Trying to understand Dutch is quite difficult, because there are a lot of different accents and words can get mixed up pretty easily. But the advantage is that most of the words are pretty similar to the English version of the word. I'd recommend you to listen to some tv-shows that you can understand reasonably well and work your way up to other programs that might be more difficult for you. Like Hedonologist said, it's also a good idea to read some newspapers, but don't read difficult ones like De Volkskrant. Try something like De Telegraaf. It's a bit unprofessional in comparison to De Volkskrant but it's perfect for learning Dutch. Good luck!

Hey everyone, My name is DaBlink182, I'm 18 years old and I'm from The Netherlands. I joined this forum to hopefully learn something new and interesting from all of you guys! I'm currently studying Spanish and Italian and I can help people with Dutch and English! See you around!