Learning the Dutch language

Proof that the Dutch think differently

Apr 02, 2021

Dear reader,

Many many years ago, when I was in college, I took a class in linguistic anthropology. One of the facts that stuck with me was the idea that all languages are equally easy to learn. What the professor meant was that they’re all equally easy for native speakers: children who are born and raised in that language. Writing, a human invention, can vary in difficulty level.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I’m going to say this: Dutch is a really hard language to learn! At least, it is hard for a native English speaker. German speakers can master Dutch in a matter of months. It took me a good four years before I could manage more than just the basic chit-chat.

Partly that was just because I’m a perfectionist, and my fear of saying something wrong stopped me from saying anything at all. So I could read the newspaper – slowly but fairly fluently – within two years. But talking? It’s still a struggle, more than 20 years later.

*A canal view in Bolsward, one of the 11 cities that the Elfstedentocht passes through. I wrote about the Elfstedentocht in an earlier Letter from Holland.*

Dutch pronunciation

I have a strong American accent and I’m pretty resigned to that. The Dutch call it leuk (funny) or, even worse, schattig (cute). They at least understand what I’m trying to say.

The main problems in pronouncing Dutch, for me, are the r sounds and the dipthongs and tripthongs. Depending on where in the country they’re from, they either slightly roll their r’s or they push them back in their throats like a French r. I end up doing a weird approximation that is closer to an American r. I’d have to speak much more slowly to manage a correct r.

The diphthongs and triphthongs are a bigger problem. A word like leuk (fun) is one syllable long, but the eu in the middle is a diphthong: two sounds. The e is a bit like ay and u is a bit like the French u: very tight-mouthed. The trick is that they’re pronounced together as a single sound somehow. It took me about two years before I could even hear it, never mind pronounce it.

And Dutch has a lot of these sorts of combinations. Uit and oud sound the same to a native speaker of English, but one means “out” while the other means “old.” Tak is a branch but taak is a task.

There are also two sounds in Dutch that are similar to the sound you make when you clear your throat in preparation for spitting. Ch a harder version; g is gentler. Fortunately, with a Jewish background, I was already comfortable with that sound from learning the basic blessings in Hebrew, so those didn’t trouble me.

There’s a story, though, that the place name, Scheveningen, was used during World War II as a way to test if a person was a German spy. In that word, the ch is pronounced like you’re preparing to spit, but the s before it has to be pronounced as well. Then the g is not pronounced in its normal way; if it comes after an n, it’s pronounced like the last g in the English phrase “going on.”

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Dutch sentence structure

But pronunciation isn’t really the problem. Generally Dutch people can get what I’m saying and I can get what they’re saying. The real problem is sentence structure. I’m convinced that their approach to sentence structure is proof that they actually think differently.

Let’s say I want to say “I want to go.” In Dutch, that’s pretty straightforward: Ik wil gaan.

Now I want to say “I want to go do some grocery shopping,” and it starts getting more complicated: Ik wil boodschappen gaan doen. (Literally: I want the grocery shopping to go do.) First verbs in a sentence are placed in the same way they would be in English. All verbs after that usually get pushed to the end of the sentence.

In English, if I thought of more information I wanted to add after I started speaking, I could add more clauses at the end of the sentence: “I want to go do some grocery shopping … tomorrow … at the supermarket … to buy a cake for my birthday.”

You can’t do that in Dutch. The additional information is usually added earlier in the sentence. “I want to go do some grocery shopping tomorrow” becomes:

Ik wil morgen boodschappen gaan doen: “I want tomorrow grocery shopping to go do.”

Morgen wil ik boodschappen gaan doen: “Tomorrow want I grocery shopping to go do.” Notice that now the subject of the sentence – I – ends up after the first verb because there’s a phrase before it.

Dutch thinking

You pretty much need most of the sentence to be complete in your head before you start it. So my rambling sentence “I want to go do some grocery shopping tomorrow at the supermarket to buy a cake for my birthday” becomes this:

Ik wil morgen in de supermarkt een taart voor mijn verjaardag gaan kopen. Literally: I want tomorrow in the supermarket a cake for my birthday to go buy.

Morgen wil ik in de supermarkt een taart voor mijn verjaardag gaan kopen. Literally: Tomorrow want I in the supermarket a cake for my birthday to go buy.

So my theory is that native Dutch speakers actually think differently than native English speakers. They complete their thoughts before they start to speak. Otherwise, how could they put a sentence like that together?

And let’s not even get started on prepositions and separable verbs: they’re a nightmare!

English in the Netherlands

Don’t worry, though, if you travel to the Netherlands. The Dutch speak good English, generally speaking. (Though, from the perspective of my former role as an English teacher, they don’t speak it quite as well as they think they do!) In the cities, especially Amsterdam and Den Haag, there are so many internationals that English might as well be the official language.

Even here in our little city of Groningen, I hear far more English in the streets than I used to. When I first arrived, I tried to speak Dutch at the market, but the market sellers would switch to German as soon as they heard my accent – which would throw me into a momentary panic. (We’re a half-hour from the border and Germans come here to shop.) Nowadays, they hear my accent and switch to English. (Then I stubbornly insist on continuing in Dutch, while they continue in English, and we both struggle along until our transaction is done. It happens all the time!)

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Letters from Holland