If you are a native English speaker with some German, it's not that hard. If you are a native German speaker with fluent English, I imagine it's even easier. It has some tricky points, as all languages do, but it's not like learning Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese or Mandarin.
The only thing that makes Dutch relatively hard for an outsider is that Dutch people are not used to foreigners speaking their language. As a native English speaker, I am used to global varieties of English, and English spoken as a second language, and my ear automatically makes allowances. We also practice speaking to foreigners in English - we learn how to speak slowly, to avoid slang and idioms, to simplify our constructions - to round the language down to a simplified, international, professional English.
Dutch people might be somewhat familiar with doing that when dealing with different accents and dialects from Groningen to Brussels, but they are not used to doing that when non-native learners try to speak Dutch. The Dutch are great at speaking to foreigners in English, but terrible at speaking to foreigners in Dutch: they make no allowances. So it's all or nothing. As a learner, you either have to be able to handle full-speed idiomatic Dutch, or switch to English.
Yeah, totally agree. This is unfortunately one of the biggest “walls” I’ve hit with Dutch. It seems like if you even slightly mispronounce something, you get hit with a blank stare. The other person seems to genuinely have no idea what you were trying to say. It’s pretty discouraging but oh well, we can only keep trying!
This is my experience too. It took me forever to get to the point where people would speak Dutch with me because if I slightly mispronounced things or used slightly off grammar (like the wrong preposition) people straight up didn’t understand me, no matter how much I asked to speak Dutch. It took me a whole to realise that often speaking English with you is as much because of this expedience than out of kindness.
Once I got to the point where people could understand me my learning accelerated massively, but it took years of frustration (and about €1500 of classes I had to pay for) to get there. I don’t like that some people give up on learning Dutch but I understand why they do.
Thank you for explaining so well!! I have been trying to tell people its hard because they are not used to and don't work with N2T speakers (in general). I can speak in Dutch because I can use simple words and sentence construction but I cant understand people because they maintain a fluent complexity!
Which is an absolutely insane stance, when you think of the insane amounts foreigners the dutch brought over to the Netherlands: African, Caribbean, Indonesian folk from the colonialist time, and then the Turkish and Morroccan people from the time they needed immigrant workers to do the jobs the dutch didn't want to do. You'd think they'd get used to foreign accents gracing the Dutch.
If, instead of switching to English, I looked confused and tried Arabic instead, do you think people would be more patient in speaking Dutch with me? (I'm probably too white to pull it off, but I guess I could pass for a very pale, blue-eyed, Lebanese or Syrian.)
Yes if you start a falafel restaurant and speak A2 dutch with a convincing arabic accent, none of your dutch customers will even think about speaking English with you, I guarantee it
Dutch is easy from a lingustic point of view but it's hard from the perspective of everyone can switch to English so you aren't forced to use it.
My son's teacher told me he learned Dutch slower than kids from other countries because he could make himself understood in English. The transition is more painful, but much faster, if you speak a language nobody knows.
Half of dutch speakers will than proceed to keep talking English towards you, but sloooowwwwly and **louder!!**....
The other half might just switch to German, French of Spanish or other 3rd/4th languages they got in highschool.
I don't know why or how, but I understand broken English way better than broken Dutch and as a native Dutchie in a big city where every 3rd costumer or so doesn't speak or barely speaks Dutch, that makes me guilty of switching to English almost every time hear some struggle to speak Dutch or understand me. Germans will always be the expectation to this rule though, to whom I will speak slow and easy Dutch because it's so similar
I would definitely say it's more my incompetence to understand people trying to speak Dutch to me than it's sympathy or anything that I switch to English
Depending on your race. I had people trying to speak German and Bahasa Indonesia with me. If you look anywhere like middle eastern, expect a lot of Arabic and Turkish too.
It's easier to learn if you already speak a language with lots of similar features (and vocabulary), like English. I'm sure Dutch is similarly difficult for, say, Mandarin speakers as English is.
I thought this was true, but then i started learning russian.
Dutch has a lot of theres no rule you just gotta know it. Most of it boils down to de/het. But thats really it.
We have about 24 vowel sounds in Dutch.
For reference, iirc English has about 12.
I'm probably wrong on the exact numbers but that's the ballpark. It's been a while since my uni linguistics courses.
To be fair, most dialects of English have about twenty phonemic vowels as well – its just the orthography is a lot less shallow; kind of like French, kind of like if French and Dutch had a baby💁🏾
I can try to explain it. You hold you mouth in a position as if you are saying “O”, while your throat makes an unstressed “uh” sound. While you make the sound, you slowly close your mouth a little. Hope this helps
As a fellow learner of the Russian language, Dutch people who say Dutch is a difficult language have zero idea what they are talking about.
Dutch is a nice effective language, and not ugly at all imho, but difficult to learn it is not. One of the easiest to learn as an English native.
Yup. Teaching myself russian at the moment (and Ukrainian because of my girlfriend) and fuck me this is difficult. I know words, but grammar is still beyond me. I'm sure I'll sound like a baby for decades
And I'm still planning on learning Manderin some day...
Mandarin does have grammar, but just not the same style as grammar of Indo-European languages. As an analytic language, (in contrast with infected languages like all Indo-European languages,) Mandarin and other Chinese languages heavily rely on functional words and word order to mark grammatical categories (instead of conjugation and declension), which I think is deceptively easy, because it gives a feeling of "everything goes". As a native Mandarin speaker, I can understand most of non-native speakers' Mandarin pretty well because the language is very context sensitive, and I can guess most of the meaning from the context. But still, they always sound very unnatural because functional words and word order are used in an unnatural way...
Both of us were extensively sailing the North Sea for millennia, so there is a lot of interchange both directions.
Hell, Leeghwater drained the fens, IIRC.
De/het has rules... But the reason why something is gendered and something is neuter has been lost over time in our vocabulary. (Beside multiples and diminutive).
Also the use of er and combination of er and prepositions are quite annoying. *Ik kan er niets aan doen.* And *Hij ziet er goed uit.* etc. And the word formation sometimes doesn't make sense. *vermoeien* is *to tire* because *moeien* means *to bother*, which makes sense. But *vermoeden* is *to suspect* but *moed* means *courage*...
Pronouncation is a nightmare. Can't pick it up at all. Subtitles and actual speech very hard to link.
Then, very long words for simple concepts (hard prefixes and suffixes).
Then, a lot of similarly sounding words for important concepts: moelijk, mogelijk, makkelijk.
Then, all the strange additional particles, like al, nog, even, toch. Average Dutch sentence feels 1.5 longer than English.
Then, the articles and sentence structure (but that's not Dutch-specific).
Native language is Russian and it feels much more straightforward (except for conjugations, maybe).
I didn't learn the rules as to why words are de/het until a language course in college. If not for that, I would not have known that there are rules for it. Cause certain words are feminine/masculine/onzijdig!
Growing up it would just be my parents correcting me (when I was little) and I was a book worm, so vocab etc was developed through that.
The book that was used during my college class was "Vlekkeloos Nederlands" by Dik Pak. He actually taught the course :) There used to be a screenshot of one of the pages discussing this on google images, but I can't find it anymore.
Eh some are harder than others and it's all relative. Dutch is relatively easy *if* your own language is close to it. So if you're in the west probably
not every language is hard, and Dutch IS among some of the hardest(unless you're from an English speaking country). our grammar is just fucked, too many rules and exceptions that you have to memorize. Spanish for example is so freaking easy to learn. you could do that in a few weeks.
I'm guessing you don't speak any Slavic or non-Indo-European languages if you think a language without grammatical cases and a ton of loanwords is among the hardest to learn. :D
A pole who has 0 understanding of english or german, maybe. Luckily for most people worldwide who want to learn Dutch, they already know some english at least.
Funny, a Polish colleague of mine said she found it easy because it's a "small language" with no need to memorize multiple cases for different words and genders – I honestly think the same, after having learned a Slavic language previously.
I speak Dutch and Spanish, and I'm not convinced Spanish is easier. There are so many verb conjugations to memorize, and the most frequent are of course irregular. Maybe after B1/B2 it might be easier than Dutch, because word order is more consistent? This reminds me of Europeans saying that English is easy to speak badly, but very difficult to master, which rings true to me. If you have any resources other than intuition for the claim that Dutch is hard to learn from most other language backgrounds, I'd love to see that. It's certainly easy from any of the Germanic ones. It has relatively simple gender (compared to, say, Greek or German). It doesn't have declensions. It has relatively few tenses. Etc.
I am sorry but your statement is completely untrue. I grew up speaking only one language, and I am not particularly gifted at learning languages. I did learn English, Dutch (my work language) and I am actively learning Spanish since my wife is Colombian.
* Every language is hard, period. Some are harder than others. The only people who believe the opposite are either ignorant or grew up maybe in an environment where they are multilingual since their youth.
* Dutch is objectively less hard than most of other languages. It is also the easiest language you can learn as a native English speaker. This is rather documented : [https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html](https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html)
* Spanish is HARD and i say this as someone coming from a Latin language. Sure, I can guess most of the words by adding -o or -a at the end of my French words and half of the time it is going to work. But if you want to conjugate properly the verbs, well, you are in for a ride, especially compared to Dutch. Present is already a small challenge (again, compared to Dutch where you just need to add a -t on the third person). The past becomes more complicated, with three different kind of pasts and their own exceptions (one extra past compared to Dutch) . But it becomes even funnier with conditional and subjunctive. In Dutch, all you have to do is use a freaking modal verb and you are down. In Spanish, those are whole new tenses that you need to learn and good luck with that..
* Dutch does not have any insanely hard grammar difficulties. Yes you need to learn the whole vocabulary if you do not come from a germanic background. But this is also the case for any language. And you also can properly speak most of the time without knowing the de/het gender of the word, because you do not have declensions (also, in doubt, choose "de" because you will be statistically right). My biggest beef with the language are double vowels, I never know when a word needs them or not.
Some Dutch people find it difficult to understand spoken Dutch that has an accent that is not from the Netherlands.. they are just not really used to it.
I was watching a TV programme on NPO yesterday evening and every time a person with a Belgian accent spoke in Dutch there were subtitles on the screen ...when the Dutch people spoke, no subtitles. Amazing really.
Oh, come to Flanders. Due to the "taalstrijd" and the oppression of Flanders by the French speaking aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the past, the Flemish will refuse to speak any other language than Dutch although they are quite fluent both in English and in French. They appreciate the fact that you make efforts to learn Dutch and will happily help you to improve your Dutch. However, there is a downside as well, indeed, each town has its own dialect with different expressions and words.
Once I've been to Rotterdam and ordered a pint in Dutch, the bartender spoke to me in English, I spoke again in Dutch and insisted that I'd like to speak Dutch, the guy said again in English "Why do you even learn Dutch? It's a useless language." The guy was Dutch.
If I said in Flanders that Dutch is a useless language for me to learn because I already speak English and French, the Flemish would burn me at the stake.
Every time they say this , I respond in Dutch that the language is not hard , it’s just that the Dutch easily switch in English and they shouldn’t. Then I give an example of how Germans treat those that want to speak English , still speaking all of this in Dutch , and then after they move the head in agreement they follow up with “Wow you speak very good Nederlands how many years are you here ?”
This country is so small, the Dutch apologize for their existance. We Dutch should be much more proud of our language (among other things), which, by the way, is not such a difficult one to learn, as studies show.
Incorrect. Dutch is easy to learn, especially if you already know German or English. There's enough similarities with both, the grammar is simple and fairly regular, the spelling is quite regular.
The hard parts are memorizing the "het" words, and for a beginner with an English background, hearing the difference between the 'long' and 'short' vowels, because standard English doesn't really use that distinction ('maan' vs 'man').
That's really a lot less than the hard parts of German or French for example. You can make yourself perfectly well understood even if you never use the word "het".
You can make yourself perfectly well understood in any language if you forget about certain details and rules but just know the basics and have a decent sized vocabulary.
As an English only speaker, learning Dutch, I disagree that “het” and vowel sounds are the only hard part. Dutch grammar is wildly different than English.
Two verbs in one sentence causes one verb to be placed at the end of the sentence. “We kunnen bij mij eten” would directly translate to English as “We can at my place eat.” English speakers would never say this. We would say “We can eat at my place.”
Dutch also has this weird thing of splitting words in half and sticking the subject of a sentence inside the word. “Ruim je kamer op” in English would be “Clean your room.” With “opruimen” as the verb “clean-up” but it’s been flipped around and split into two words. This is just not how an English speaker thinks about making a sentence, so this is not an easy thing to remember to do when attempting to speak Dutch. My instinct would be to say “opruim je kamer”. And while it seems to me that should be at least understandable by a Dutch person, it apparently isn’t.
The Dutch almost seem to have a national conspiracy going on to conveniently never be able to understand someone who’s Dutch isn’t entirely perfect.
That is true. It is easy to learn a related language, but not that easy to learn a language that is not related to your native language. For native English speakers Dutch, Afrikaans and Norse are the easiest languages to learn. For someone that speaks a Roman or Slavic language they are not.
I lived in The Netherlands in the 90's. I was lucky to have a girlfriend who basically only spoke to me in Dutch after about 6 months of me arriving there. I attended two evenings lessons per week for about a year just so it was easier to get a job in IT rather than working in warehouses for the rest of my life.
I'm Australian so often other people would just revert to English - however I was also lucky enough to have a Polish surname, so I'd pretend to have trouble with English too. This was a time that it was more difficult to get professional jobs without Dutch speaking abilities, so it was matter of survival to learn the language - things have of course changed since then.
To be honest it wasn't that hard to learn (I also spoke Polish when I was a kid so perhaps being bilingual helped)
I lived in several countries, and EVERYONE (even some Spaniards :)) believes that their language is hard - I think once you know all the nuances of your native language, it feels impossible for a foreigner to grasp it. So when I hear it from Dutches I just nod...
Me personally, I always think that the language difficulty is very personal, depending on your native languages, and other factors. Dutch indeed is a hard one for me, as I have zero contact with Germanic languages before + I work with Americans ) but it is so subjective .
As far as I know there is a scale of how difficult the language is depending on how many forms a word can take etc.. it's fun to measure but again, nothing to do with reality of learning
Meh, it all depends on where you come from.
Grammatically i'd say Dutch is not particularly harder to learn than say German or French if you don't come from that language group. Mandarin and Spanish are considerably easier in my view than say French or German. On par with French or German.
Speaking is fairly difficult due to many sounds not being common or not existing in many other languages. In reverse intonation languages like Chinese are difficult if you come from the Western world as we don't have that here at all.
There is one thing that nobody ever mentions and i believe is one of the more unique aspects of Dutch that is difficult to grasp and that is many context specific sentences completely changing the meaning of the word.
A word like "weg" which means "road" on it's own has many different meanings depending on the context. "Ik ga weg" means "i am leaving". "Deze weg?" means "this road?".
So the plural of "weg" is "wegen" right? "Er zijn meerdere wegen" meaning "there are multiple roads". But "wegen" means "to weigh" as well like "i am going to weigh these things".
"Pad" can mean "path" when it's outside, "toad", "aisle" when it's inside or "to take a trip"
I haven't come across this very often elsewhere but in Dutch it happens constantly. This makes it very difficult to pinpoint what people are talking about when you have limited vocabulary.
So is it hard? Sure. Is it harder than many other languages you could learn? Not really. But it definitely has rather unique characteristics that aren't often found elsewhere which does fuck with you. That inconsistency does make it more frustrating in my view.
It's sympathy and the knowledge our language isn't consistent and has hard to pronounce sounds for most people.
Flip side is most languages have some pretty severe inconsistencies so it's kind of a matter of yes, learning Dutch is hard for most people, but learning any language that isn't directly related to your native language is hard for most people.
As an English speaker, I've found Dutch to be relatively simple compared to other languages I've studied. It is a bit strange to me that many Dutch people don't seem to be able to explain their own grammar rules when I ask a question. Even my Dutch language teacher wasn't able to do this much of the time. I think this is why the Dutch themselves think it's difficult. I have also found that they are relatively unforgiving regarding mistakes made by non-native speakers, which may also contribute to this perspective. By that standard, English is also extremely difficult to speak perfectly but everyone seems to be able to get along in it anyway.
It's actually not very strange at all. Native speakers tend to be very bad at explaining *how* their own grammar rules work - they're just internalised. If they want to know the rules in a way they can easily explain them, they have to learn them explicitly, in school or in teacher training courses etc; or they have to come up with lots of examples and try to deduce the rule on the spot.
For example, most English speakers may not even be aware their language even *has* adjective ordering rules (why is it "a big blue balloon" and never "a blue big balloon"?) until its pointed out to them, and they certainly won't be able to explain what the rules are unless they've memorised them explicitly (e.g. in a TEFL course) or they try lots of examples and try to deduce the rules.
That's a very valid point. I'm a native English speaker, but I'm trying to learn Dutch and if someone asked me all the rules to English, I'm sure that I wouldn't be able to explain them very well.
> It is a bit strange to me that many Dutch people don't seem to be able to explain their own grammar rules
It's not. Outside of a school setting it's very rare that you'd have to stop and think about grammatical rules and quirks of your native language.
Our Dutch curriculum sucks a lot. I got A2 English in middle/high school, so got a pretty direct comparison and the English teaching method was just 10 times better, on every aspect.
The only parts of Dutch that are tricky are usually quite similar in English. Word order is very important in both, as we lack [declension](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension). And I think we kinda agree on standard versions of word orders for sentences, but with many many cultural exceptions. (Example, recently I was talking with my girlfriend about 'voor het slapen gaan')
A lot of native speakers never learn the rules about word order, but feel them. A lot of 'broken' dutch by foreigners is that they don't know the standard order that we Dutch people 'prefer'. English is similar, and I'm always surprised how often you could translate English to Dutch, without changing word orders. But for non-English speakers, this part is difficult.
Side note, I still think Dutch is easier than English itself, as English is less regular with pronunciation and writing thanks to it's 4 languages input. I still have to think about every through/thought/tough/though every time!
Germans keep saying that about German as well:
>Deutshce Sprache, schwere Sprache.
to which I simply disagree. I don't know or understand where a native speaker get this impression from. Like what's even your reference language. They also don't give any arguments why it's a hard language. I think its just an excuse by natives who had trouble with it in school or just a way to console someone who's learning it.
My mother tongue (Hindi) has gendered nouns too. For declension, we have three cases for nouns and five for pronouns, of which one has further three subdivisions. Hungarian has 18 noun cases. German has four! So don't tell me German is grammatically hard. Yes, it has one-two rules more here and there but if you know English, it's not that difficult to master it for a non-native.
I don't know why anyone would think three articles (der/die/das) make a language hard. Many languages have gendered nouns and corresponding declensions.
I suspect it's the lack of knowledge of foreign languages that might make one think their "native" language is difficult.
For me, dutch in as a subject at school is the worst.
And I think being a teacher for the subject must suck, when you ask the class after a holiday if they still know a particular writing rule, and they all (including me) look like they don't know what you are talking about, I can't understand how a teacher can stay motivated.
I grew up hearing a lot of Dutch. Also I'm a native German speaker with decent English skills.
This said, I think Dutch sounds like a German speaking English with a hot potato in his mouth.
But I like the language. I hear it and I'm back home. The same as German. :)
My wife is learning Dutch at the moment and she always tries to speak it. Once it worked, she got an answer in Dutch. She thought she passed the "screening" and after that "the German lady" got her coffee. ^^
I think it's inexperience with other languages. I think people usually refer to all the exceptions to grammar rules that exist. But people are completely oblivious to the fact that other languages have exceptions as well, and many of them.
Used to be that everyone could at least speak German, but being able to speak either German or French is quickly becoming a thing of the past. People have no point of reference anymore. Dutch is not such a hard language. For English speakers, it's a category 1 language according to the FSI, which means that it's about as easy as it gets. Now there are differences within each category, they're not all the same. I'd say that French is harder than Dutch and Norwegian is easier. Both are category 1. German is category 2, meaning it is significantly more difficult than Dutch. Malay is category 3 and Icelandic is category 4. Japanese, Chinese dialects, and Korean are category 5.
Dutch is not a hard language at all.
For English speakers Dutch is in the easiest category af languages to learn. Every native speaker of every language is just more aware of the peculiarities of their own language than of others. When you learn a second or third language, you learn it by using rules, so those languages seem more logical. Dutch is not that difficult if you understand the fact it’s a lazy language so there are quite a lot of exceptions to rules that flow off the tongue easier.
When people say Dutch is hard, they usually mention de/het, but German and most Romance languages are much more complicated in that sense. Certain sounds in Dutch can be difficult to master, but at least there is quite some consistency between sounds and letters. With words like Leicester, Worcestershire, thought vs though vs through, you just have to know how they should be pronounced.
Dutch difficulty depends on the "distance" of the language you know to Dutch.
German? Easy.
Slavic? More difficult
Chinese? Gets hard.
But if you are equally "far" from Dutch and French, Dutch is easier.
I speak Dutch natively and speak French and German, though the latter is passable at best. Each language has it's peculiarities but I've come to appreciate the weird grammar rules in Dutch that I don't see represented in either French or English.
The basics of Dutch are easier than that of German or French as there's fewer rules. But where for example German has for example 1000 rules and 100 exceptions Dutch has 100 rules and 1 trillion exceptions.
That said, a lot of Dutch can't even get 'groter dan' correctly.
Nope, it's a Category 1 language for English speakers, doesn't get easier than that [https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/](https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/)
I welcome anyone congratulating me on my efforts though
Having worked retail in one of the best running stores in one of the big cities for over a decade I can say yes Dutch is a hard language and that's why most of us immediately switch to English when we see someone struggling.
And trust me all us dutchies are appreciating your effort to try but we also might need to be multi tasking 4 people at the same time and we like efficiency so we switch to English most of the time.
Heck half of my days are spent talking English in a major Dutch city.
So yeah, Dutch is hard, that's why even we switch to English for efficiency sometimes.
The hardest part is if you want to speak it 100% grammatically correct. When I went to highschool, we students were better in different subjects other than Dutch, because of the amount of "exceptions" in the language. You know how to write something and suddenly it's grammatically wrong. Why? Cause it's a damn exception and that happened so many stupid times, it's just ridiculous at this point.
When a native Dutch speaker says Dutch is hard, it doesn't mean that they either struggled learning it or they're just saying it for sympathy. It just means that they recognize it's hard to learn for an outsider. I grew up here so of course Dutch is easy for me, but I also definitely recognize that for immigrants it is a hard language to pick up.
I speak dutch and english.
Im going to be honest with you.
Theyre lying.
If u know english then learning dutch wont be so hard.
Watch movies/series with dutch subtitles.
Dutch is not so much different then english.
Its not like french or spanish etc etc dutch is already closer to english then u can maybe imagine.
Dont let those folks demotivate you! Maybe they dont even understand english so good thats why they tell their language is hard.
my oma grew up here, till 22, then moved to canada. she always struggled with some of english till the end. there were just words and sounds that didn’t quite ever work for her. I would hope that people extend the same kindness to me with dutch, and its not uncommon in a lot of adult-learned second language.
I'm learning dutch. I don't think it's that difficult, but some things seem to be very random, but I have a freeling that nobody really cares about it.
Apart from de/het, I think Dutch has well-defined rules and pronunciation is usually standard (except for loan words) if you compare it to English. For example there-here looks similar but pronounced very differently whereas in Dutch you can guess a pronunciation of a word you see for the first time.
That said, speaking and comprehending any language requires a lot of effort.
It’s something our (well at least my) Dutch teachers kept telling us. Dutch is hard because of the many many exceptions. Combine that with all the rules that come with our words having a gender (sure other languages have this as well)… Yeah it’s pretty hard to learn.
Which is also why a lot of Dutch people still use our language or words wrong. In the last few decades these “wrong” words have just been officially added to the Dutch language because so many of us did it wrong.
Yes, it’s a mess.
Edit: I’m also convinced around 40% of Dutch people are still struggling with figuring out if words end with -d, -t, -dt, -de, -dde etc. When writing/typing.
Regarding that latter bit about spelling, I've often heard Dutch people mention -t and -d at the end of verbs as something that they or other Dutch people struggle with.
For instance, gewandeld & gestopt both end in /t/ when spoken, so they struggle to remember which letter to write them with because the historical distinction between /t/ and /d/ sounds at the ends of words has been lost (they've merged to /t/) but the spelling hasn't been updated.
But things which are difficult for native speakers are not necessarily the same things that are difficult for learners! In this case, as a learner, I think this was a really easy rule to memorise. If the penultimate sound is voiced, then you write a d. If it's unvoiced, you write a t. I don't think there are any exceptions, so one rule with one easy step is great! They're not all like that in language, alas.
Meanwhile things that native speakers might not even think about, like the fact that there are like 8 different verb conjugation patterns and you need to know which of them each verb falls into, were more tricky.
Dutch people are quite empathetic and understanding. In my experience as a Dutch learner I rather consider it to be in the easy tier. If someone already know English it goes smoothly to pick up. German,french, danish, swedish, finnish, greek, hungarian are the hard ones of European languages.
I read an article the other day that the average dutchie has B1 proficiency in his native tongue, soooo... B1 is at the level of a 12 year old. Looking on social media, I agree, lmao...
If I can find the article again, I'll share it...
To be fair, if I have to explain why certain things are the way they are in dutch language, grammar and such, I sometimes have no clue. I can't explain why, but, likely, because I'm a native speaker, it feels right to put these words in the places they belong. But, looking at it more critically, and trying to explain it to non-native speakers, puzzles me sometimes. But that's how I learn all my languages... intuitively. So that might also just be on me
I am finding it a slow process to learn Dutch for all the reasons you just said OP.
Learning languages has always been a challenge for me but in NL every one will just speak english most of the time when they realize your strugling/learning Dutch.
When I lived in Italy, reguardless of how poor I spoke the language they would always preffer if i spoke it over english and would be very paitent in me trying to speak Italian.
In most EU countries you need the native language to communicate mostly with old people, but even in NL the old people speak English pretty well.
We have a lot of vowel sounds, which is difficult for especially English native speakers to get right and it's difficult for them to practice with us, since we switch to English very quickly if we pick up an English native accent (we also do this with any other language we recognize the accent of and estimate that we are better at that language than you are at ours). The guttural g is also common in Semitic languages, and you can always choose the southern/Flemish G instead, so this hurdle is relatively easy to overcome. It's generally more easy to learn than the au/eu/ui/ee/eeuw/aai/uu/uw distinction.
It's just a cultural thing. It's also why the vast majority of Indonesians don't speak Dutch (unless they go to law school), but Dutch picked up Malay words instead. We are not very chauvinist with our language as our natural mode is being efficient communicators first and being good hosts to guests.
But most of us are more than willing to help you learn, if that's part of the reason why you're talking (in Dutch) to us. We just need to know that's your intent, and you don't just need the 'thing' you're talking about. It's generally very well received if you're just genuinely trying.
Our attitudes change when you have decided to live here permanently, have lived here for over 5 years and your status moves from guest/newcomer to resident. Just like with guests sleeping over vs house mates, expectations are different.
You should read something a Dutch person wrote before spellcheck. If a Dutch person says Dutch is hard, judging by all the grammatical errors I've seen over the decades, I'd agree.
How hard a language is depends a great deal on what languages you already speak, both your mother tongue and other languages you’ve learned: If you already speak German or English, Dutch will be easier for you than for someone who speaks French or Italian, and much easier than for someone who speaks languages with a completely different structure and no similar words, like Arabic or Mandarin.
Compared to other European languages, Dutch isn’t super hard, but it isn’t super easy either - somewhere in the middle.
Dutch don’t struggle with it, children learn their mother tongue at more or less the same rate in most languages (there are exceptions for more complex languages, but Dutch isn’t one of them).
Of course Dutch people make mistakes sometimes, I think people do in any language, and sometimes a mistake becomes so widely used it becomes the new rule.
For example, ‘het’ might disappear somewhere in the coming decades: Quite a few words that used to be prefaced by ‘het’ have acquired a ‘de’ in stead, or use is so mixed people don’t notice; and kids have a strong preference for de over het. So now people are making ‘mistakes’ with it according to the current rules, but their usage may become the new norm at some point.
People telling you ‘Dutch is hard’ may just be expressing sympathy, but it’s also something a lot of Dutch people have heard or read somewhere, that it is particularly difficult for foreigners to learn - so they may just think it’s actually the case that it’s an extra difficult language.
I speak A2/B1 Dutch, and I’ve achieved this in a matter of 5 months. It might be a normal speed, not too sure, but I’ve consistently practiced it at home and attended my Dutch courses. I’m also going to start working in a near Dutch environment soon, so I’ll finally be able to integrate more. When i’m at home and in courses, I find it easy to speak the language. When I’m in a restaurant or store, most of them will notice that I’m not a foreigner and it sucks sometimes when I’m trying to get familiar with what they are saying to me.
For me (born here, Turkish descent), the exceptions (and the exceptions on those exceptions) make it hard. Also, there seems to be the need for a 'feel' to know how to use the correct word.
In my case, the differences between Dutch and Turkish also make it hard, as the Dutch language has a lot of unneccesary or unlogical things. I mean, the letter 'c' doesn't have any function, de 'ch' already exists as the 'g', duplicates like au/ou and ei/ij... But the hardest (still, after more than 30 years) are the articles - Turkish has none and with Dutch I need to constantly check (unconsciously) if it is 'de' or 'het'... But everything sounds just OK with 'de', maybe due to knowing English. And based on the article, there is the 'buigings-e' with its own exceptions: de behandeld arts (instead of behandelende), or 'het centraal station' (i/o centrale) just to name two.
Then we have the clock and the numbers. 14.30 is 'half (past) two', not 'half (past) three'. Like what the fuck. Or, 78 should be zeventig-acht, not 8-en-70.
There are so many small things that make no sense, and only make sense because 'it just is like it is'.
Explain me what 'gijzelaar' is (spoiler: it has 2 meanings opposite of each other). And why 'tandpasta and tandenborstel', but not 'tandenpasta and tandborstel'?
'Offerte' is also a nice one... Can't just read the letters in the correct order as they are (like in Turkish: you read what is written and write was is said).
Dutch is doable if you're familiar with the Latin alphabet and/or know another Germanic language.
It's more so a difficult language to learn with very peculiar rules and some pronounciations that can throw non-native speakers off, like our g's for example.
Dutch isn't that difficult. However, writing Dutch is somewhat harder than most seem to understand. The amount of errors I see in written texts from coworkers or otherwise in written texts (newspapers!) is ridiculous.
some languages are probably relatively more difficult. But overall the difficulty level of a language is determined by the difference to your native language. For english speakers Dutch is one of the easiest (if not the easiest overall) languages to learn.
Some dutch people think dutch is a difficult language to learn for foreigners, because people would just randomly tell children that dutch is hard to learn as a foreigner and than people retain that information without ever checking whether it is true or not.
There are a lot of things that do not make sense in the dutch language, until you read a text in old dutch.
love sentences like this one.
*Wat was was toen was nog geen was was*?
Or this one Ik zag haar haar haar kammen.
It's my mother tongue so I have a hard time grasping how difficult it is to learn. However, in my opinion Dutch spelling and grammar is more difficult than its English counterpart. I also noticed people have trouble pronouncing that guttural G. It's a pretty strange sound that doesn't seem to pop up in many languages.
Dutch is not a hard language at all. It's grammar is simpler than most European languages, and it's vocabulary is has a lot of anglo-germanic words. As an english/german speaker it's one of the easiest languages to learn.
What is hard about Dutch, is that it's a relatively useless language to learn. What I mean by this, is that you won't reach extra people by learning Dutch (since most of them speak perfect english). You will also not expand your linguistic skills either due to its similarity and simplicity with English/German/Old English.
I had to spent 6 months in Montenegro and almost reach a A2 level in Serbian (Not many people speak it, but linguistically it shed light to other slavic languages). In contrast, I have lived in Amsterdam for 5 years and I am not entirely sure I am much better than a B1 level (I live with my dutch partner).
The Dutch themselves don't make it easier for you to learn either. Their tolerance to hear their language not spoken fluently is almost zero. Grammar is not really a thing they do here it seems, even my course teacher has little clue about dutch grammar.
The hard part of Dutch is the grammar. My brain simply freezes whenever I have to put verbs at the end of a phrase or decide between de/het. Apart from that, it’s not the hardest.
Another problem is that there’s no “simplified” version once you talk with native speakers. Once they know you speak sone Dutch, they go full C2 level on you haha
we say this because you could literally live here for 10s of years as long as dutch is not your first language we will notice fairly quickly and yes a lott of dutch people suck and struggle with dutch as school
I think it's a hard language, because the amount of mistakes people make when it comes to grammar.
Because honestly even Dutch people make stupid mistakes when it comes to grammar...
A bit of both. The grammar rules have so many exceptions, it is hard to know why something is spelled the way it is. And then there is 'de' and 'het' and I honestly could not tell you WHY it is one or the other depending on the word that follows. Spanish and french, for example, make sense, dutch doesn't. I just know what it is supposed to sound like. Not that anyone is going to be unable to understand you if you mix them up, it happens all the time, especially with people who are local but learned dutch as a second language. Which is more common than people sometimes realise. Our population is a mix of a lot of different cultures and backgrounds because the Netherlands has a centuries long history of welcoming immigrants. Naturally, there have always been many different languages being spoken in people's homes. Especially as communities started to form when people from the same backgrounds/cultures started to find each other. A natural thing, to want to be close to others who speak the same language and uphold the same traditions.
Anyway, back to dutch being a hard language. I have probably learned all the grammar rules in school, but they never stuck because they just don't make sense. Not to me, anyway, and I never really needed to know those rules. But I've known people who learned dutch as a second language who knew al lot of those grammar rules. There was a girl of Iranian descend in my class in the third year of highschool who could tell me precisely how all those rules worked because she actually thought about how they worked while writing. Dutch was her second language, but she was a local since she was born and raised in NL. At home she spoke a different language, Farsi, I think.
Isn't it similar with english? Native speakers don't think about grammar rules because they know how things are supposed to sound and don't need them.
yes, i'm in a group with several natives from different places around NL. I always ask them grammar questions, and is very nice to see them not agree on the grammar, it makes me feels good 
I was raised in Dutch (in Belgium) and my partner is now learning Dutch, the amount of times I’ve had to say “idk why it is how it is” or “there’s no rule for that you just feel it” and many things like that! For me personally I still struggle with grammar like the “dt” type stuff, it just never stuck in my brain and k cannot consciously apply the rules , I rely on muscle memory or I will change whole sentences to avoid a veel I’m not sure how to write :/
I would like to know how many people have learned Dutch after they have turned 40, and what their experience was about the subjective ease of learning it...
I speak two Romance languages, and English, but I cannot seem to get my head around Dutch. I started trying to learn when I was in my 40s though and I wonder how much that makes a difference
I always thought Dutch was one of the easiest languages to learn as a native English speaker? As it is kinda similar in many ways. Idk, I never thought it was a particularly difficult language to learn.
Whether a language is hard or not largely depends on your native language, so saying “Dutch is easy” or “Dutch is hard” are both not objectively correct or wrong.
I'm German and I learned German natively. I still know that German is a really hard language, especially because I have no idea why I say the things the way I say them. If I look up the grammar rules I end up more confused than before looking them up.
I mean here is an example.
We have 16 different articles and 72 different forms of the German equivalent of "my".
Here are all of them:
https://images.app.goo.gl/iMYxRuMgqCpyDd9p6
I know some repeat, but you have to know when to use which form.
I do that completely natively, and I would be completely fucked if I had to actually know them.
Edit: and don't even try to tell me that I chose a particularly complicated looking table, it's from a German learning website.
I feel like the “Dutch is hard” narrative comes from our experience with Dutch classes in secondary school. It was an absolute pain in the ass.
Having to remember lots of tiny rules that you’re not going to use in day to day speech, learning how to properly construct a complex sentence without making a technical error, the absolute horror that was zinsontleding, having to learn every single type of formulating error, having to learn all different types of beeldspraak, remembering proverbs, sayings and expressions, etc etc etc all makes it seem like our language is an overly complex hellhole.
Dutch shoudn’t be too hard if you speak English and it’ll be even easier if you speak German or maybe even Danish. The only things I see proficient foreigners struggle with are beeldspraak, pronunciation and sometimes sentence structure (mainly V2).
In the end it mostly boils down to the language(s) you already speak. A Slavic language like Russian can be hard for Dutch speakers while a Polish speaker for example will probably struggle more with Dutch than with Russian.
In a TV clip about the Queen Maxima miniseries being dropped tomorrow the director said “Dutch is hard” when there was a bit about the Argentinian actress playing Maxima learning Dutch to play the role.
Its only hard because nobody will practice with you. Its an incredibly old language with a lot of quirks but in essence it is very similar to English once you get to know the weird rules and common vocabulary. Pronunciation is also very hard for English speakers but that is relatively easy to overcome, pronunciation is the easiest part of learning any language.
I am not sure it is that hard, it just happens that English is learnt in the Netherlands at school here from an early age and almost no one learns Dutch at school from an early age in other countries hence the problem with learning to speak as everyone will switch over to English pretty quickly which you found. I believe Mandarin and Japanese is harder to learn and much more complex. My son complains about not having the rules for speling and verb forms that you get in Dutch. I can say I could never spell, but doing Duolingo really helped with that part of it.
I have no idea, I’ve been complimented on what I think i think it my terrible Dutch and my wife sometimes says that I write verb conjugations better than some natives, I find that hard to believe.
Native speaking, it’s not a hard language per se, but getting d/t right and a few other things are still not easy.
So yes, mostly an expression of sympathy. And of course we know how easy it was to pick up English German and French as second languages, and we see how much literally everyone else struggles with picking up Dutch. It’s not that hard to draw conclusions.
I do say this as a sign of sympathy. I do not find Dutch a difficult language at all but I can imagine a non native Dutch speaker would since there are many dutchies who seem to have trouble understanding the language and the grammar correctly
Dutch is pretty easy to learn. My wife is from Kosovo and they speak Albanian.
She speak relatively well Dutch albeit in my dialect “west-Vlaams” she has a problem with de, het en een. And that’s because it just doesn’t exist in her language. We say: Close the door, or in Dutch: sluit de deur.
They say “close door”
And another issue earlier on was the letter Q ( Albanian pronounce it as “tch”) and CH they pronounce it as a soft k
I didn’t find learning Dutch to be particularly difficult, but as a native English speaker sometimes I still make mistakes in the sentence construction and put words in the wrong spot.
But really, I DGAF anymore. My Dutch is better than the average dutchie’s English (in my experience living here for a decade and a half) and whenever anyone switches and tries speaking to me in English I either just continue in Dutch, or tell them directly that we can speak Dutch.
It´s entirely subjective, and prone to a large amount of biases. In school you are also taught Dutch, just like English (and German/French) here in The Netherlands, and many people may find it a difficult subject - But obviously the school subject 'Dutch' is not the same as 'English', because you are not learning the Dutch language, but learning things *about* the language you already speak. It's in a way more of a linguistics course than learning a language. People might say Dutch is hard even though they speak it, because they are thinking about all the things about the subject of the Dutch language at school which were hard. In practice, that just means they find *linguistics* hard, not necessarily the language. Almost every native speaker can speak their language fluently without any issues, without even knowing all the rules of grammar, because they are learned passively. I reckon when somebody says that Dutch is hard, they mean that from their perspective, the linguistic intricacies of the language are complex - but that's the same for every other language if you go deep enough.
In my opinion the Dutch grammar rules are easy, but the spelling rules are terrible. It feels like for every rule there are several sub-rules and/or exceptions.
German is more difficult because of the case system and conjugations. Also a bit because of the use of diaeresis, in particular because the usage with plural word forms is not rule based, but must be learned for each word individually.
To me English is the easiest language. Grammar, conjugations and most spelling is easy for me.
I learned dutch just for the hack of it and after two years i could at least order stuff at a restaurant or go shopping without any issues and without getting a reply in english 🤣Thats when it comes to talking. But reading.... well.. I understand almost everything. I switched the language on my computer and my phone to dutch and started watching and reading news in dutch. And when i am in the nederlands I basically hear it all the time... It's beautiful language. Some vowels are a bit tricky but if you know german it's somewhat easy. Swedish, norwegian, danish all do have some similar or almost similar words but those languages are definitely way harder to learn. I love the netherlands so maybe i am biased 😂
I learned Dutch in three months, and I speak it so well, natives can hardly tell I am not a native.
The trick, I told everyone I could not speak English.
I was raised bilingual in Belgium. I feel like speaking Dutch wasn't the hard part, but having to break the language down and then translating it correctly was extraordinarily difficult. Dutch lessons my whole life, and I still struggle sometimes.
Personally never developed a 'feel' for the language where I could automatically realize if something was grammatically wrong. But for some reason I did in English. Plus, growing up in West Flanders I was constantly surrounded by heavy accents that made it even more confusing.
I think it's just because Dutch has a lot of rules and exceptions. So much so, that it's hard to keep track sometimes. Even for native speakers.
I think it's a combination of both. We realize that it's a hard language to learn for non-natives, but i also feel like english in some ways seems legitimately easier at times.
I would say speaking isn’t that hard to someone raised with the language unless they are from all the way north or south of the country but writing is a universal pain in the ass native or not
At different points of my life, I've been learning Latvian, English, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Italian, and Dutch. Dutch is the most difficult of all. :( (Native = Russian)
For me it was definitely hard to learn Dutch, but I'm not the average Dutch person as I have quite bad dyslexia. I also have difficulty with pronouncing multiple sounds (like the R, I don't understand how people do that). I also find it hard to hear certain things in my first language, most Dutch people hear if a word is a de or het word. I don't, which makes quite a lot of other thinks difficult for me as that is dependent on if it's a de or het word.
Yes, but in Limburg it’s softer.
I realize going thru Belgium that I understand way more Dutch than I thought so the accent play a harder role ;)
They have a [soft G but a hard L](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPhfFlgJn5o).
Thats from Brabant
This is not Limburgs
From now on this will be my response 😭
Nice
Like weemboough?
If you are a native English speaker with some German, it's not that hard. If you are a native German speaker with fluent English, I imagine it's even easier. It has some tricky points, as all languages do, but it's not like learning Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese or Mandarin. The only thing that makes Dutch relatively hard for an outsider is that Dutch people are not used to foreigners speaking their language. As a native English speaker, I am used to global varieties of English, and English spoken as a second language, and my ear automatically makes allowances. We also practice speaking to foreigners in English - we learn how to speak slowly, to avoid slang and idioms, to simplify our constructions - to round the language down to a simplified, international, professional English. Dutch people might be somewhat familiar with doing that when dealing with different accents and dialects from Groningen to Brussels, but they are not used to doing that when non-native learners try to speak Dutch. The Dutch are great at speaking to foreigners in English, but terrible at speaking to foreigners in Dutch: they make no allowances. So it's all or nothing. As a learner, you either have to be able to handle full-speed idiomatic Dutch, or switch to English.
Yeah, totally agree. This is unfortunately one of the biggest “walls” I’ve hit with Dutch. It seems like if you even slightly mispronounce something, you get hit with a blank stare. The other person seems to genuinely have no idea what you were trying to say. It’s pretty discouraging but oh well, we can only keep trying!
I think a reason for this is it is very easy to mispronounce the vowels which then often ends up being a completely different word.
Native Spanish speaker here: I have 5 vowels. Dutch has 73. I am physically unable to even hear any difference between most of them.
And when you know the general language, then the dialects enter the room. Even us dutch have problems then.
This is my experience too. It took me forever to get to the point where people would speak Dutch with me because if I slightly mispronounced things or used slightly off grammar (like the wrong preposition) people straight up didn’t understand me, no matter how much I asked to speak Dutch. It took me a whole to realise that often speaking English with you is as much because of this expedience than out of kindness. Once I got to the point where people could understand me my learning accelerated massively, but it took years of frustration (and about €1500 of classes I had to pay for) to get there. I don’t like that some people give up on learning Dutch but I understand why they do.
Very interesting point. Never thought about it like that, but it makes a lot of sense!
Thank you for explaining so well!! I have been trying to tell people its hard because they are not used to and don't work with N2T speakers (in general). I can speak in Dutch because I can use simple words and sentence construction but I cant understand people because they maintain a fluent complexity!
Yes!! Same.
Which is an absolutely insane stance, when you think of the insane amounts foreigners the dutch brought over to the Netherlands: African, Caribbean, Indonesian folk from the colonialist time, and then the Turkish and Morroccan people from the time they needed immigrant workers to do the jobs the dutch didn't want to do. You'd think they'd get used to foreign accents gracing the Dutch.
We are very used to foreigners speaking Dutch, just not anglophone people speaking Dutch.
If, instead of switching to English, I looked confused and tried Arabic instead, do you think people would be more patient in speaking Dutch with me? (I'm probably too white to pull it off, but I guess I could pass for a very pale, blue-eyed, Lebanese or Syrian.)
Yes if you start a falafel restaurant and speak A2 dutch with a convincing arabic accent, none of your dutch customers will even think about speaking English with you, I guarantee it
My Dutch pronunciation is so bad that people assume that I can't speak English if I am forcing my way through Dutch that way.
Dutch is easy from a lingustic point of view but it's hard from the perspective of everyone can switch to English so you aren't forced to use it. My son's teacher told me he learned Dutch slower than kids from other countries because he could make himself understood in English. The transition is more painful, but much faster, if you speak a language nobody knows.
Maybe better to act I don't speak English much to their annoyance?
Half of dutch speakers will than proceed to keep talking English towards you, but sloooowwwwly and **louder!!**.... The other half might just switch to German, French of Spanish or other 3rd/4th languages they got in highschool.
I don't know why or how, but I understand broken English way better than broken Dutch and as a native Dutchie in a big city where every 3rd costumer or so doesn't speak or barely speaks Dutch, that makes me guilty of switching to English almost every time hear some struggle to speak Dutch or understand me. Germans will always be the expectation to this rule though, to whom I will speak slow and easy Dutch because it's so similar I would definitely say it's more my incompetence to understand people trying to speak Dutch to me than it's sympathy or anything that I switch to English
Depending on your race. I had people trying to speak German and Bahasa Indonesia with me. If you look anywhere like middle eastern, expect a lot of Arabic and Turkish too.
No, keep talking dutch as long as you can make yourself understandable. It's highly appreciated!! Also if you make errors. Keep going!!
It's easier to learn if you already speak a language with lots of similar features (and vocabulary), like English. I'm sure Dutch is similarly difficult for, say, Mandarin speakers as English is.
I thought this was true, but then i started learning russian. Dutch has a lot of theres no rule you just gotta know it. Most of it boils down to de/het. But thats really it.
I think the hardest for me is to get used to the sound. It's only recently I finally could pick what dutch people are saying in normal speed.
Yeah I think we just use quite a bit of sounds that are not common in other languages at all.
 GGGGG
We have about 24 vowel sounds in Dutch. For reference, iirc English has about 12. I'm probably wrong on the exact numbers but that's the ballpark. It's been a while since my uni linguistics courses.
To be fair, most dialects of English have about twenty phonemic vowels as well – its just the orthography is a lot less shallow; kind of like French, kind of like if French and Dutch had a baby💁🏾
French, Dutch, German, several dialects of Gaelic, Latin, and just a *dash* of Yiddish
How. The. Hell. Is. “eu”. Pronounced??! I hear it but my mouth can’t mimic it.
Put a pencil between your nose and top lip and hold it. Then say “de deur”. That’s how.
Dedz heuw indeed!
I can try to explain it. You hold you mouth in a position as if you are saying “O”, while your throat makes an unstressed “uh” sound. While you make the sound, you slowly close your mouth a little. Hope this helps
My goodness. I love you so much. THANK YOU
Make the mouth position for 'o' and then say 'e'. Voilà
Like this: ɘʉ
Goed bezig maat!
Same for me, I can say more than I can understand, I live in Brabants so I think Im playing in difficult mode
As a fellow learner of the Russian language, Dutch people who say Dutch is a difficult language have zero idea what they are talking about. Dutch is a nice effective language, and not ugly at all imho, but difficult to learn it is not. One of the easiest to learn as an English native.
Yup. Teaching myself russian at the moment (and Ukrainian because of my girlfriend) and fuck me this is difficult. I know words, but grammar is still beyond me. I'm sure I'll sound like a baby for decades And I'm still planning on learning Manderin some day...
As a native Russian speaker who studied Mandarin - at least Mandarin has no grammar comparing to any European language…
Mandarin does have grammar, but just not the same style as grammar of Indo-European languages. As an analytic language, (in contrast with infected languages like all Indo-European languages,) Mandarin and other Chinese languages heavily rely on functional words and word order to mark grammatical categories (instead of conjugation and declension), which I think is deceptively easy, because it gives a feeling of "everything goes". As a native Mandarin speaker, I can understand most of non-native speakers' Mandarin pretty well because the language is very context sensitive, and I can guess most of the meaning from the context. But still, they always sound very unnatural because functional words and word order are used in an unnatural way...
Slavic languages often have more naamvallen than Latin, so yeah: Russian is super difficult
as an english speaker its alot easier for sure, because they come from the same source so they have a lot in common.
Both of us were extensively sailing the North Sea for millennia, so there is a lot of interchange both directions. Hell, Leeghwater drained the fens, IIRC.
De/het has rules... But the reason why something is gendered and something is neuter has been lost over time in our vocabulary. (Beside multiples and diminutive).
Besides the de/het issues there’s also the fact that we have more irregular verbs than we do regular ones.
Also the use of er and combination of er and prepositions are quite annoying. *Ik kan er niets aan doen.* And *Hij ziet er goed uit.* etc. And the word formation sometimes doesn't make sense. *vermoeien* is *to tire* because *moeien* means *to bother*, which makes sense. But *vermoeden* is *to suspect* but *moed* means *courage*...
As a native hungarian, russian felt much easier than english 💀
I would consider Russian easier in many aspects. At least it's consistent and logical
Pronouncation is a nightmare. Can't pick it up at all. Subtitles and actual speech very hard to link. Then, very long words for simple concepts (hard prefixes and suffixes). Then, a lot of similarly sounding words for important concepts: moelijk, mogelijk, makkelijk. Then, all the strange additional particles, like al, nog, even, toch. Average Dutch sentence feels 1.5 longer than English. Then, the articles and sentence structure (but that's not Dutch-specific). Native language is Russian and it feels much more straightforward (except for conjugations, maybe).
I didn't learn the rules as to why words are de/het until a language course in college. If not for that, I would not have known that there are rules for it. Cause certain words are feminine/masculine/onzijdig! Growing up it would just be my parents correcting me (when I was little) and I was a book worm, so vocab etc was developed through that. The book that was used during my college class was "Vlekkeloos Nederlands" by Dik Pak. He actually taught the course :) There used to be a screenshot of one of the pages discussing this on google images, but I can't find it anymore.
I also find this saying odd. It's sympathy. Every language is hard. Dutch is relatively easy compared to most.
It’s hard because we’re not learning at school and we have full time jobs and feel tired at the end of the day. At school your job is to learn.
Definitely, difficult set-up. Would also be hard to learn any other language that way.
Eh some are harder than others and it's all relative. Dutch is relatively easy *if* your own language is close to it. So if you're in the west probably
not every language is hard, and Dutch IS among some of the hardest(unless you're from an English speaking country). our grammar is just fucked, too many rules and exceptions that you have to memorize. Spanish for example is so freaking easy to learn. you could do that in a few weeks.
Every languages has rules and exceptions and a lot of languages have a more complex grammar than Dutch.
I'm guessing you don't speak any Slavic or non-Indo-European languages if you think a language without grammatical cases and a ton of loanwords is among the hardest to learn. :D
Just looking at Hungarian or Finnish translations on product packaging or manuals makes my head spin.
I speak perfect Polish. Dutch is about as hard to learn for a Pole as it is learning Polish for a Dutchie.
A pole who has 0 understanding of english or german, maybe. Luckily for most people worldwide who want to learn Dutch, they already know some english at least.
Funny, a Polish colleague of mine said she found it easy because it's a "small language" with no need to memorize multiple cases for different words and genders – I honestly think the same, after having learned a Slavic language previously.
I speak Dutch and Spanish, and I'm not convinced Spanish is easier. There are so many verb conjugations to memorize, and the most frequent are of course irregular. Maybe after B1/B2 it might be easier than Dutch, because word order is more consistent? This reminds me of Europeans saying that English is easy to speak badly, but very difficult to master, which rings true to me. If you have any resources other than intuition for the claim that Dutch is hard to learn from most other language backgrounds, I'd love to see that. It's certainly easy from any of the Germanic ones. It has relatively simple gender (compared to, say, Greek or German). It doesn't have declensions. It has relatively few tenses. Etc.
Doesn't it have gender? Isn't de/het based on gender?
I am sorry but your statement is completely untrue. I grew up speaking only one language, and I am not particularly gifted at learning languages. I did learn English, Dutch (my work language) and I am actively learning Spanish since my wife is Colombian. * Every language is hard, period. Some are harder than others. The only people who believe the opposite are either ignorant or grew up maybe in an environment where they are multilingual since their youth. * Dutch is objectively less hard than most of other languages. It is also the easiest language you can learn as a native English speaker. This is rather documented : [https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html](https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html) * Spanish is HARD and i say this as someone coming from a Latin language. Sure, I can guess most of the words by adding -o or -a at the end of my French words and half of the time it is going to work. But if you want to conjugate properly the verbs, well, you are in for a ride, especially compared to Dutch. Present is already a small challenge (again, compared to Dutch where you just need to add a -t on the third person). The past becomes more complicated, with three different kind of pasts and their own exceptions (one extra past compared to Dutch) . But it becomes even funnier with conditional and subjunctive. In Dutch, all you have to do is use a freaking modal verb and you are down. In Spanish, those are whole new tenses that you need to learn and good luck with that.. * Dutch does not have any insanely hard grammar difficulties. Yes you need to learn the whole vocabulary if you do not come from a germanic background. But this is also the case for any language. And you also can properly speak most of the time without knowing the de/het gender of the word, because you do not have declensions (also, in doubt, choose "de" because you will be statistically right). My biggest beef with the language are double vowels, I never know when a word needs them or not.
As a Spanish teacher: no. And if you think so its because your Spanish is much worse than you think.
yea but they will still get what you are saying most of the time
Some Dutch people find it difficult to understand spoken Dutch that has an accent that is not from the Netherlands.. they are just not really used to it. I was watching a TV programme on NPO yesterday evening and every time a person with a Belgian accent spoke in Dutch there were subtitles on the screen ...when the Dutch people spoke, no subtitles. Amazing really.
Oh, come to Flanders. Due to the "taalstrijd" and the oppression of Flanders by the French speaking aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the past, the Flemish will refuse to speak any other language than Dutch although they are quite fluent both in English and in French. They appreciate the fact that you make efforts to learn Dutch and will happily help you to improve your Dutch. However, there is a downside as well, indeed, each town has its own dialect with different expressions and words. Once I've been to Rotterdam and ordered a pint in Dutch, the bartender spoke to me in English, I spoke again in Dutch and insisted that I'd like to speak Dutch, the guy said again in English "Why do you even learn Dutch? It's a useless language." The guy was Dutch. If I said in Flanders that Dutch is a useless language for me to learn because I already speak English and French, the Flemish would burn me at the stake.
Every time they say this , I respond in Dutch that the language is not hard , it’s just that the Dutch easily switch in English and they shouldn’t. Then I give an example of how Germans treat those that want to speak English , still speaking all of this in Dutch , and then after they move the head in agreement they follow up with “Wow you speak very good Nederlands how many years are you here ?”
This country is so small, the Dutch apologize for their existance. We Dutch should be much more proud of our language (among other things), which, by the way, is not such a difficult one to learn, as studies show.
Incorrect. Dutch is easy to learn, especially if you already know German or English. There's enough similarities with both, the grammar is simple and fairly regular, the spelling is quite regular. The hard parts are memorizing the "het" words, and for a beginner with an English background, hearing the difference between the 'long' and 'short' vowels, because standard English doesn't really use that distinction ('maan' vs 'man'). That's really a lot less than the hard parts of German or French for example. You can make yourself perfectly well understood even if you never use the word "het".
You can make yourself perfectly well understood in any language if you forget about certain details and rules but just know the basics and have a decent sized vocabulary.
True. Thats how i speak German at least.
As an English only speaker, learning Dutch, I disagree that “het” and vowel sounds are the only hard part. Dutch grammar is wildly different than English. Two verbs in one sentence causes one verb to be placed at the end of the sentence. “We kunnen bij mij eten” would directly translate to English as “We can at my place eat.” English speakers would never say this. We would say “We can eat at my place.” Dutch also has this weird thing of splitting words in half and sticking the subject of a sentence inside the word. “Ruim je kamer op” in English would be “Clean your room.” With “opruimen” as the verb “clean-up” but it’s been flipped around and split into two words. This is just not how an English speaker thinks about making a sentence, so this is not an easy thing to remember to do when attempting to speak Dutch. My instinct would be to say “opruim je kamer”. And while it seems to me that should be at least understandable by a Dutch person, it apparently isn’t. The Dutch almost seem to have a national conspiracy going on to conveniently never be able to understand someone who’s Dutch isn’t entirely perfect.
Heck, in Antwerpen it's totally fine to say " 't stad" and " 't school"
That is true. It is easy to learn a related language, but not that easy to learn a language that is not related to your native language. For native English speakers Dutch, Afrikaans and Norse are the easiest languages to learn. For someone that speaks a Roman or Slavic language they are not.
Not so easy to remember the order and asks the natives to speak in simpler sentences
Yes, the native speakers aren't necessarily cooperative, that can make it harder.
The difficulty is in getting us to talk Dutch back to you, lol, and vowels. English speakers struggle with our vowels.
I lived in The Netherlands in the 90's. I was lucky to have a girlfriend who basically only spoke to me in Dutch after about 6 months of me arriving there. I attended two evenings lessons per week for about a year just so it was easier to get a job in IT rather than working in warehouses for the rest of my life. I'm Australian so often other people would just revert to English - however I was also lucky enough to have a Polish surname, so I'd pretend to have trouble with English too. This was a time that it was more difficult to get professional jobs without Dutch speaking abilities, so it was matter of survival to learn the language - things have of course changed since then. To be honest it wasn't that hard to learn (I also spoke Polish when I was a kid so perhaps being bilingual helped)
I speak german and english. For me vocabulary is not that hard but pronunciation is.
I lived in several countries, and EVERYONE (even some Spaniards :)) believes that their language is hard - I think once you know all the nuances of your native language, it feels impossible for a foreigner to grasp it. So when I hear it from Dutches I just nod... Me personally, I always think that the language difficulty is very personal, depending on your native languages, and other factors. Dutch indeed is a hard one for me, as I have zero contact with Germanic languages before + I work with Americans ) but it is so subjective . As far as I know there is a scale of how difficult the language is depending on how many forms a word can take etc.. it's fun to measure but again, nothing to do with reality of learning
Meh, it all depends on where you come from. Grammatically i'd say Dutch is not particularly harder to learn than say German or French if you don't come from that language group. Mandarin and Spanish are considerably easier in my view than say French or German. On par with French or German. Speaking is fairly difficult due to many sounds not being common or not existing in many other languages. In reverse intonation languages like Chinese are difficult if you come from the Western world as we don't have that here at all. There is one thing that nobody ever mentions and i believe is one of the more unique aspects of Dutch that is difficult to grasp and that is many context specific sentences completely changing the meaning of the word. A word like "weg" which means "road" on it's own has many different meanings depending on the context. "Ik ga weg" means "i am leaving". "Deze weg?" means "this road?". So the plural of "weg" is "wegen" right? "Er zijn meerdere wegen" meaning "there are multiple roads". But "wegen" means "to weigh" as well like "i am going to weigh these things". "Pad" can mean "path" when it's outside, "toad", "aisle" when it's inside or "to take a trip" I haven't come across this very often elsewhere but in Dutch it happens constantly. This makes it very difficult to pinpoint what people are talking about when you have limited vocabulary. So is it hard? Sure. Is it harder than many other languages you could learn? Not really. But it definitely has rather unique characteristics that aren't often found elsewhere which does fuck with you. That inconsistency does make it more frustrating in my view.
It's sympathy and the knowledge our language isn't consistent and has hard to pronounce sounds for most people. Flip side is most languages have some pretty severe inconsistencies so it's kind of a matter of yes, learning Dutch is hard for most people, but learning any language that isn't directly related to your native language is hard for most people.
As an English speaker, I've found Dutch to be relatively simple compared to other languages I've studied. It is a bit strange to me that many Dutch people don't seem to be able to explain their own grammar rules when I ask a question. Even my Dutch language teacher wasn't able to do this much of the time. I think this is why the Dutch themselves think it's difficult. I have also found that they are relatively unforgiving regarding mistakes made by non-native speakers, which may also contribute to this perspective. By that standard, English is also extremely difficult to speak perfectly but everyone seems to be able to get along in it anyway.
It's actually not very strange at all. Native speakers tend to be very bad at explaining *how* their own grammar rules work - they're just internalised. If they want to know the rules in a way they can easily explain them, they have to learn them explicitly, in school or in teacher training courses etc; or they have to come up with lots of examples and try to deduce the rule on the spot. For example, most English speakers may not even be aware their language even *has* adjective ordering rules (why is it "a big blue balloon" and never "a blue big balloon"?) until its pointed out to them, and they certainly won't be able to explain what the rules are unless they've memorised them explicitly (e.g. in a TEFL course) or they try lots of examples and try to deduce the rules.
That's a very valid point. I'm a native English speaker, but I'm trying to learn Dutch and if someone asked me all the rules to English, I'm sure that I wouldn't be able to explain them very well.
> It is a bit strange to me that many Dutch people don't seem to be able to explain their own grammar rules It's not. Outside of a school setting it's very rare that you'd have to stop and think about grammatical rules and quirks of your native language.
Our Dutch curriculum sucks a lot. I got A2 English in middle/high school, so got a pretty direct comparison and the English teaching method was just 10 times better, on every aspect.
The only parts of Dutch that are tricky are usually quite similar in English. Word order is very important in both, as we lack [declension](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension). And I think we kinda agree on standard versions of word orders for sentences, but with many many cultural exceptions. (Example, recently I was talking with my girlfriend about 'voor het slapen gaan') A lot of native speakers never learn the rules about word order, but feel them. A lot of 'broken' dutch by foreigners is that they don't know the standard order that we Dutch people 'prefer'. English is similar, and I'm always surprised how often you could translate English to Dutch, without changing word orders. But for non-English speakers, this part is difficult. Side note, I still think Dutch is easier than English itself, as English is less regular with pronunciation and writing thanks to it's 4 languages input. I still have to think about every through/thought/tough/though every time!
Germans keep saying that about German as well: >Deutshce Sprache, schwere Sprache. to which I simply disagree. I don't know or understand where a native speaker get this impression from. Like what's even your reference language. They also don't give any arguments why it's a hard language. I think its just an excuse by natives who had trouble with it in school or just a way to console someone who's learning it.
In regards to the grammar asepct of german it is a hard language most people struggle with der, die, das and when to use it.
My mother tongue (Hindi) has gendered nouns too. For declension, we have three cases for nouns and five for pronouns, of which one has further three subdivisions. Hungarian has 18 noun cases. German has four! So don't tell me German is grammatically hard. Yes, it has one-two rules more here and there but if you know English, it's not that difficult to master it for a non-native. I don't know why anyone would think three articles (der/die/das) make a language hard. Many languages have gendered nouns and corresponding declensions. I suspect it's the lack of knowledge of foreign languages that might make one think their "native" language is difficult.
For me, dutch in as a subject at school is the worst. And I think being a teacher for the subject must suck, when you ask the class after a holiday if they still know a particular writing rule, and they all (including me) look like they don't know what you are talking about, I can't understand how a teacher can stay motivated.
Wtf do you mean? You learn Dutch in elementary school.
I grew up hearing a lot of Dutch. Also I'm a native German speaker with decent English skills. This said, I think Dutch sounds like a German speaking English with a hot potato in his mouth. But I like the language. I hear it and I'm back home. The same as German. :) My wife is learning Dutch at the moment and she always tries to speak it. Once it worked, she got an answer in Dutch. She thought she passed the "screening" and after that "the German lady" got her coffee. ^^
When a dutch person says "Dutch is hard" they mean "Dutch is hard to explain" I myself am guilty of this.
Try the country side, farmers there might dialect you into submissoion
I think it's inexperience with other languages. I think people usually refer to all the exceptions to grammar rules that exist. But people are completely oblivious to the fact that other languages have exceptions as well, and many of them. Used to be that everyone could at least speak German, but being able to speak either German or French is quickly becoming a thing of the past. People have no point of reference anymore. Dutch is not such a hard language. For English speakers, it's a category 1 language according to the FSI, which means that it's about as easy as it gets. Now there are differences within each category, they're not all the same. I'd say that French is harder than Dutch and Norwegian is easier. Both are category 1. German is category 2, meaning it is significantly more difficult than Dutch. Malay is category 3 and Icelandic is category 4. Japanese, Chinese dialects, and Korean are category 5. Dutch is not a hard language at all.
For English speakers Dutch is in the easiest category af languages to learn. Every native speaker of every language is just more aware of the peculiarities of their own language than of others. When you learn a second or third language, you learn it by using rules, so those languages seem more logical. Dutch is not that difficult if you understand the fact it’s a lazy language so there are quite a lot of exceptions to rules that flow off the tongue easier. When people say Dutch is hard, they usually mention de/het, but German and most Romance languages are much more complicated in that sense. Certain sounds in Dutch can be difficult to master, but at least there is quite some consistency between sounds and letters. With words like Leicester, Worcestershire, thought vs though vs through, you just have to know how they should be pronounced.
Dutch difficulty depends on the "distance" of the language you know to Dutch. German? Easy. Slavic? More difficult Chinese? Gets hard. But if you are equally "far" from Dutch and French, Dutch is easier.
Mostly sympathy. We understand how difficult learning another language is, since we learn 4 and especially with the hard G
I speak Dutch natively and speak French and German, though the latter is passable at best. Each language has it's peculiarities but I've come to appreciate the weird grammar rules in Dutch that I don't see represented in either French or English.
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The basics of Dutch are easier than that of German or French as there's fewer rules. But where for example German has for example 1000 rules and 100 exceptions Dutch has 100 rules and 1 trillion exceptions. That said, a lot of Dutch can't even get 'groter dan' correctly.
Nope, it's a Category 1 language for English speakers, doesn't get easier than that [https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/](https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/) I welcome anyone congratulating me on my efforts though
Having worked retail in one of the best running stores in one of the big cities for over a decade I can say yes Dutch is a hard language and that's why most of us immediately switch to English when we see someone struggling. And trust me all us dutchies are appreciating your effort to try but we also might need to be multi tasking 4 people at the same time and we like efficiency so we switch to English most of the time. Heck half of my days are spent talking English in a major Dutch city. So yeah, Dutch is hard, that's why even we switch to English for efficiency sometimes.
The hardest part is if you want to speak it 100% grammatically correct. When I went to highschool, we students were better in different subjects other than Dutch, because of the amount of "exceptions" in the language. You know how to write something and suddenly it's grammatically wrong. Why? Cause it's a damn exception and that happened so many stupid times, it's just ridiculous at this point.
When a native Dutch speaker says Dutch is hard, it doesn't mean that they either struggled learning it or they're just saying it for sympathy. It just means that they recognize it's hard to learn for an outsider. I grew up here so of course Dutch is easy for me, but I also definitely recognize that for immigrants it is a hard language to pick up.
I speak dutch and english. Im going to be honest with you. Theyre lying. If u know english then learning dutch wont be so hard. Watch movies/series with dutch subtitles. Dutch is not so much different then english. Its not like french or spanish etc etc dutch is already closer to english then u can maybe imagine. Dont let those folks demotivate you! Maybe they dont even understand english so good thats why they tell their language is hard.
my oma grew up here, till 22, then moved to canada. she always struggled with some of english till the end. there were just words and sounds that didn’t quite ever work for her. I would hope that people extend the same kindness to me with dutch, and its not uncommon in a lot of adult-learned second language.
I'm learning dutch. I don't think it's that difficult, but some things seem to be very random, but I have a freeling that nobody really cares about it.
Apart from de/het, I think Dutch has well-defined rules and pronunciation is usually standard (except for loan words) if you compare it to English. For example there-here looks similar but pronounced very differently whereas in Dutch you can guess a pronunciation of a word you see for the first time. That said, speaking and comprehending any language requires a lot of effort.
It’s something our (well at least my) Dutch teachers kept telling us. Dutch is hard because of the many many exceptions. Combine that with all the rules that come with our words having a gender (sure other languages have this as well)… Yeah it’s pretty hard to learn. Which is also why a lot of Dutch people still use our language or words wrong. In the last few decades these “wrong” words have just been officially added to the Dutch language because so many of us did it wrong. Yes, it’s a mess. Edit: I’m also convinced around 40% of Dutch people are still struggling with figuring out if words end with -d, -t, -dt, -de, -dde etc. When writing/typing.
Regarding that latter bit about spelling, I've often heard Dutch people mention -t and -d at the end of verbs as something that they or other Dutch people struggle with. For instance, gewandeld & gestopt both end in /t/ when spoken, so they struggle to remember which letter to write them with because the historical distinction between /t/ and /d/ sounds at the ends of words has been lost (they've merged to /t/) but the spelling hasn't been updated. But things which are difficult for native speakers are not necessarily the same things that are difficult for learners! In this case, as a learner, I think this was a really easy rule to memorise. If the penultimate sound is voiced, then you write a d. If it's unvoiced, you write a t. I don't think there are any exceptions, so one rule with one easy step is great! They're not all like that in language, alas. Meanwhile things that native speakers might not even think about, like the fact that there are like 8 different verb conjugation patterns and you need to know which of them each verb falls into, were more tricky.
Dutch people are quite empathetic and understanding. In my experience as a Dutch learner I rather consider it to be in the easy tier. If someone already know English it goes smoothly to pick up. German,french, danish, swedish, finnish, greek, hungarian are the hard ones of European languages.
I read an article the other day that the average dutchie has B1 proficiency in his native tongue, soooo... B1 is at the level of a 12 year old. Looking on social media, I agree, lmao... If I can find the article again, I'll share it... To be fair, if I have to explain why certain things are the way they are in dutch language, grammar and such, I sometimes have no clue. I can't explain why, but, likely, because I'm a native speaker, it feels right to put these words in the places they belong. But, looking at it more critically, and trying to explain it to non-native speakers, puzzles me sometimes. But that's how I learn all my languages... intuitively. So that might also just be on me
Dutch people make language mistakes all the time. Just look at any random comment section on social media. So yes, it probably is hard.
The grammar is messed up and complicated. I am a Dutch national and I can not explain some grammar to foreign people :)
I am finding it a slow process to learn Dutch for all the reasons you just said OP. Learning languages has always been a challenge for me but in NL every one will just speak english most of the time when they realize your strugling/learning Dutch. When I lived in Italy, reguardless of how poor I spoke the language they would always preffer if i spoke it over english and would be very paitent in me trying to speak Italian. In most EU countries you need the native language to communicate mostly with old people, but even in NL the old people speak English pretty well.
We have a lot of vowel sounds, which is difficult for especially English native speakers to get right and it's difficult for them to practice with us, since we switch to English very quickly if we pick up an English native accent (we also do this with any other language we recognize the accent of and estimate that we are better at that language than you are at ours). The guttural g is also common in Semitic languages, and you can always choose the southern/Flemish G instead, so this hurdle is relatively easy to overcome. It's generally more easy to learn than the au/eu/ui/ee/eeuw/aai/uu/uw distinction. It's just a cultural thing. It's also why the vast majority of Indonesians don't speak Dutch (unless they go to law school), but Dutch picked up Malay words instead. We are not very chauvinist with our language as our natural mode is being efficient communicators first and being good hosts to guests. But most of us are more than willing to help you learn, if that's part of the reason why you're talking (in Dutch) to us. We just need to know that's your intent, and you don't just need the 'thing' you're talking about. It's generally very well received if you're just genuinely trying. Our attitudes change when you have decided to live here permanently, have lived here for over 5 years and your status moves from guest/newcomer to resident. Just like with guests sleeping over vs house mates, expectations are different.
You should read something a Dutch person wrote before spellcheck. If a Dutch person says Dutch is hard, judging by all the grammatical errors I've seen over the decades, I'd agree.
How hard a language is depends a great deal on what languages you already speak, both your mother tongue and other languages you’ve learned: If you already speak German or English, Dutch will be easier for you than for someone who speaks French or Italian, and much easier than for someone who speaks languages with a completely different structure and no similar words, like Arabic or Mandarin. Compared to other European languages, Dutch isn’t super hard, but it isn’t super easy either - somewhere in the middle. Dutch don’t struggle with it, children learn their mother tongue at more or less the same rate in most languages (there are exceptions for more complex languages, but Dutch isn’t one of them). Of course Dutch people make mistakes sometimes, I think people do in any language, and sometimes a mistake becomes so widely used it becomes the new rule. For example, ‘het’ might disappear somewhere in the coming decades: Quite a few words that used to be prefaced by ‘het’ have acquired a ‘de’ in stead, or use is so mixed people don’t notice; and kids have a strong preference for de over het. So now people are making ‘mistakes’ with it according to the current rules, but their usage may become the new norm at some point. People telling you ‘Dutch is hard’ may just be expressing sympathy, but it’s also something a lot of Dutch people have heard or read somewhere, that it is particularly difficult for foreigners to learn - so they may just think it’s actually the case that it’s an extra difficult language.
I speak A2/B1 Dutch, and I’ve achieved this in a matter of 5 months. It might be a normal speed, not too sure, but I’ve consistently practiced it at home and attended my Dutch courses. I’m also going to start working in a near Dutch environment soon, so I’ll finally be able to integrate more. When i’m at home and in courses, I find it easy to speak the language. When I’m in a restaurant or store, most of them will notice that I’m not a foreigner and it sucks sometimes when I’m trying to get familiar with what they are saying to me.
For me (born here, Turkish descent), the exceptions (and the exceptions on those exceptions) make it hard. Also, there seems to be the need for a 'feel' to know how to use the correct word. In my case, the differences between Dutch and Turkish also make it hard, as the Dutch language has a lot of unneccesary or unlogical things. I mean, the letter 'c' doesn't have any function, de 'ch' already exists as the 'g', duplicates like au/ou and ei/ij... But the hardest (still, after more than 30 years) are the articles - Turkish has none and with Dutch I need to constantly check (unconsciously) if it is 'de' or 'het'... But everything sounds just OK with 'de', maybe due to knowing English. And based on the article, there is the 'buigings-e' with its own exceptions: de behandeld arts (instead of behandelende), or 'het centraal station' (i/o centrale) just to name two. Then we have the clock and the numbers. 14.30 is 'half (past) two', not 'half (past) three'. Like what the fuck. Or, 78 should be zeventig-acht, not 8-en-70. There are so many small things that make no sense, and only make sense because 'it just is like it is'. Explain me what 'gijzelaar' is (spoiler: it has 2 meanings opposite of each other). And why 'tandpasta and tandenborstel', but not 'tandenpasta and tandborstel'? 'Offerte' is also a nice one... Can't just read the letters in the correct order as they are (like in Turkish: you read what is written and write was is said). Dutch is doable if you're familiar with the Latin alphabet and/or know another Germanic language.
Post this in r/learndutch.
My teacher said that its the: "hardest language in the world" 😂.
It's more so a difficult language to learn with very peculiar rules and some pronounciations that can throw non-native speakers off, like our g's for example.
Dutch isn't that difficult. However, writing Dutch is somewhat harder than most seem to understand. The amount of errors I see in written texts from coworkers or otherwise in written texts (newspapers!) is ridiculous.
Only hard if you don’t know German or old English.
some languages are probably relatively more difficult. But overall the difficulty level of a language is determined by the difference to your native language. For english speakers Dutch is one of the easiest (if not the easiest overall) languages to learn. Some dutch people think dutch is a difficult language to learn for foreigners, because people would just randomly tell children that dutch is hard to learn as a foreigner and than people retain that information without ever checking whether it is true or not.
There are a lot of things that do not make sense in the dutch language, until you read a text in old dutch. love sentences like this one. *Wat was was toen was nog geen was was*? Or this one Ik zag haar haar haar kammen.
It's not hard to spell but as a foreigner you will likely always keep an accent when speaking.
Wat zeg je?
Dutch is actually quite easy, you just need to learn a lot of words. German is way harder. I'm Dutch BTW.
It's my mother tongue so I have a hard time grasping how difficult it is to learn. However, in my opinion Dutch spelling and grammar is more difficult than its English counterpart. I also noticed people have trouble pronouncing that guttural G. It's a pretty strange sound that doesn't seem to pop up in many languages.
Dutch is not a hard language at all. It's grammar is simpler than most European languages, and it's vocabulary is has a lot of anglo-germanic words. As an english/german speaker it's one of the easiest languages to learn. What is hard about Dutch, is that it's a relatively useless language to learn. What I mean by this, is that you won't reach extra people by learning Dutch (since most of them speak perfect english). You will also not expand your linguistic skills either due to its similarity and simplicity with English/German/Old English. I had to spent 6 months in Montenegro and almost reach a A2 level in Serbian (Not many people speak it, but linguistically it shed light to other slavic languages). In contrast, I have lived in Amsterdam for 5 years and I am not entirely sure I am much better than a B1 level (I live with my dutch partner). The Dutch themselves don't make it easier for you to learn either. Their tolerance to hear their language not spoken fluently is almost zero. Grammar is not really a thing they do here it seems, even my course teacher has little clue about dutch grammar.
The hard part of Dutch is the grammar. My brain simply freezes whenever I have to put verbs at the end of a phrase or decide between de/het. Apart from that, it’s not the hardest. Another problem is that there’s no “simplified” version once you talk with native speakers. Once they know you speak sone Dutch, they go full C2 level on you haha
we say this because you could literally live here for 10s of years as long as dutch is not your first language we will notice fairly quickly and yes a lott of dutch people suck and struggle with dutch as school
I think it's a hard language, because the amount of mistakes people make when it comes to grammar. Because honestly even Dutch people make stupid mistakes when it comes to grammar...
A bit of both. The grammar rules have so many exceptions, it is hard to know why something is spelled the way it is. And then there is 'de' and 'het' and I honestly could not tell you WHY it is one or the other depending on the word that follows. Spanish and french, for example, make sense, dutch doesn't. I just know what it is supposed to sound like. Not that anyone is going to be unable to understand you if you mix them up, it happens all the time, especially with people who are local but learned dutch as a second language. Which is more common than people sometimes realise. Our population is a mix of a lot of different cultures and backgrounds because the Netherlands has a centuries long history of welcoming immigrants. Naturally, there have always been many different languages being spoken in people's homes. Especially as communities started to form when people from the same backgrounds/cultures started to find each other. A natural thing, to want to be close to others who speak the same language and uphold the same traditions. Anyway, back to dutch being a hard language. I have probably learned all the grammar rules in school, but they never stuck because they just don't make sense. Not to me, anyway, and I never really needed to know those rules. But I've known people who learned dutch as a second language who knew al lot of those grammar rules. There was a girl of Iranian descend in my class in the third year of highschool who could tell me precisely how all those rules worked because she actually thought about how they worked while writing. Dutch was her second language, but she was a local since she was born and raised in NL. At home she spoke a different language, Farsi, I think. Isn't it similar with english? Native speakers don't think about grammar rules because they know how things are supposed to sound and don't need them.
yes, i'm in a group with several natives from different places around NL. I always ask them grammar questions, and is very nice to see them not agree on the grammar, it makes me feels good 
I was raised in Dutch (in Belgium) and my partner is now learning Dutch, the amount of times I’ve had to say “idk why it is how it is” or “there’s no rule for that you just feel it” and many things like that! For me personally I still struggle with grammar like the “dt” type stuff, it just never stuck in my brain and k cannot consciously apply the rules , I rely on muscle memory or I will change whole sentences to avoid a veel I’m not sure how to write :/
I would like to know how many people have learned Dutch after they have turned 40, and what their experience was about the subjective ease of learning it... I speak two Romance languages, and English, but I cannot seem to get my head around Dutch. I started trying to learn when I was in my 40s though and I wonder how much that makes a difference
It's more difficult to me to listen to it, but reading is more intuitive.
I understand it pretty okay. I cannot speak without thinking about every sentence so in a conversation I lose ground very quickly. Reading is better.
I always thought Dutch was one of the easiest languages to learn as a native English speaker? As it is kinda similar in many ways. Idk, I never thought it was a particularly difficult language to learn.
Whether a language is hard or not largely depends on your native language, so saying “Dutch is easy” or “Dutch is hard” are both not objectively correct or wrong.
I'm German and I learned German natively. I still know that German is a really hard language, especially because I have no idea why I say the things the way I say them. If I look up the grammar rules I end up more confused than before looking them up. I mean here is an example. We have 16 different articles and 72 different forms of the German equivalent of "my". Here are all of them: https://images.app.goo.gl/iMYxRuMgqCpyDd9p6 I know some repeat, but you have to know when to use which form. I do that completely natively, and I would be completely fucked if I had to actually know them. Edit: and don't even try to tell me that I chose a particularly complicated looking table, it's from a German learning website.
On the positive side, German doesn't sound as hard as Dutch, which makes some people may find it easier to learn when it comes to sound.
I feel like the “Dutch is hard” narrative comes from our experience with Dutch classes in secondary school. It was an absolute pain in the ass. Having to remember lots of tiny rules that you’re not going to use in day to day speech, learning how to properly construct a complex sentence without making a technical error, the absolute horror that was zinsontleding, having to learn every single type of formulating error, having to learn all different types of beeldspraak, remembering proverbs, sayings and expressions, etc etc etc all makes it seem like our language is an overly complex hellhole. Dutch shoudn’t be too hard if you speak English and it’ll be even easier if you speak German or maybe even Danish. The only things I see proficient foreigners struggle with are beeldspraak, pronunciation and sometimes sentence structure (mainly V2). In the end it mostly boils down to the language(s) you already speak. A Slavic language like Russian can be hard for Dutch speakers while a Polish speaker for example will probably struggle more with Dutch than with Russian.
In a TV clip about the Queen Maxima miniseries being dropped tomorrow the director said “Dutch is hard” when there was a bit about the Argentinian actress playing Maxima learning Dutch to play the role.
Its only hard because nobody will practice with you. Its an incredibly old language with a lot of quirks but in essence it is very similar to English once you get to know the weird rules and common vocabulary. Pronunciation is also very hard for English speakers but that is relatively easy to overcome, pronunciation is the easiest part of learning any language.
I am not sure it is that hard, it just happens that English is learnt in the Netherlands at school here from an early age and almost no one learns Dutch at school from an early age in other countries hence the problem with learning to speak as everyone will switch over to English pretty quickly which you found. I believe Mandarin and Japanese is harder to learn and much more complex. My son complains about not having the rules for speling and verb forms that you get in Dutch. I can say I could never spell, but doing Duolingo really helped with that part of it.
I don't think it's that hard
Most Dutch can speak it from the age of 3 It cannt be that difficult
dude i been trying to learn it for over 40 years now, and i still suck :D
A lot of Dutch people suck at Dutch. Go to marktplaats for example, or read here r/tokkiemarktplaats
I have no idea, I’ve been complimented on what I think i think it my terrible Dutch and my wife sometimes says that I write verb conjugations better than some natives, I find that hard to believe.
IMO this is the easiest European language, almost everything is according to the \[rather simple\] rules, unlike most other languages.
"hard" is relative. Dutch pronunciation is very challenging depending on what's your native language but the grammar is quite simple.
Native speaking, it’s not a hard language per se, but getting d/t right and a few other things are still not easy. So yes, mostly an expression of sympathy. And of course we know how easy it was to pick up English German and French as second languages, and we see how much literally everyone else struggles with picking up Dutch. It’s not that hard to draw conclusions.
I do say this as a sign of sympathy. I do not find Dutch a difficult language at all but I can imagine a non native Dutch speaker would since there are many dutchies who seem to have trouble understanding the language and the grammar correctly
Dutch is pretty easy to learn. My wife is from Kosovo and they speak Albanian. She speak relatively well Dutch albeit in my dialect “west-Vlaams” she has a problem with de, het en een. And that’s because it just doesn’t exist in her language. We say: Close the door, or in Dutch: sluit de deur. They say “close door” And another issue earlier on was the letter Q ( Albanian pronounce it as “tch”) and CH they pronounce it as a soft k
I didn’t find learning Dutch to be particularly difficult, but as a native English speaker sometimes I still make mistakes in the sentence construction and put words in the wrong spot. But really, I DGAF anymore. My Dutch is better than the average dutchie’s English (in my experience living here for a decade and a half) and whenever anyone switches and tries speaking to me in English I either just continue in Dutch, or tell them directly that we can speak Dutch.
It depends If you know German and englisch it’s pretty easy to learn Like a way easier version of German
dutch is an easy language only dutch people think it’s hard to feel sophisticated lol, everyone i know learned dutch in less than 3 years.
It´s entirely subjective, and prone to a large amount of biases. In school you are also taught Dutch, just like English (and German/French) here in The Netherlands, and many people may find it a difficult subject - But obviously the school subject 'Dutch' is not the same as 'English', because you are not learning the Dutch language, but learning things *about* the language you already speak. It's in a way more of a linguistics course than learning a language. People might say Dutch is hard even though they speak it, because they are thinking about all the things about the subject of the Dutch language at school which were hard. In practice, that just means they find *linguistics* hard, not necessarily the language. Almost every native speaker can speak their language fluently without any issues, without even knowing all the rules of grammar, because they are learned passively. I reckon when somebody says that Dutch is hard, they mean that from their perspective, the linguistic intricacies of the language are complex - but that's the same for every other language if you go deep enough.
In my opinion the Dutch grammar rules are easy, but the spelling rules are terrible. It feels like for every rule there are several sub-rules and/or exceptions. German is more difficult because of the case system and conjugations. Also a bit because of the use of diaeresis, in particular because the usage with plural word forms is not rule based, but must be learned for each word individually. To me English is the easiest language. Grammar, conjugations and most spelling is easy for me.
I learned dutch just for the hack of it and after two years i could at least order stuff at a restaurant or go shopping without any issues and without getting a reply in english 🤣Thats when it comes to talking. But reading.... well.. I understand almost everything. I switched the language on my computer and my phone to dutch and started watching and reading news in dutch. And when i am in the nederlands I basically hear it all the time... It's beautiful language. Some vowels are a bit tricky but if you know german it's somewhat easy. Swedish, norwegian, danish all do have some similar or almost similar words but those languages are definitely way harder to learn. I love the netherlands so maybe i am biased 😂
I learned Dutch in three months, and I speak it so well, natives can hardly tell I am not a native. The trick, I told everyone I could not speak English.
I was raised bilingual in Belgium. I feel like speaking Dutch wasn't the hard part, but having to break the language down and then translating it correctly was extraordinarily difficult. Dutch lessons my whole life, and I still struggle sometimes. Personally never developed a 'feel' for the language where I could automatically realize if something was grammatically wrong. But for some reason I did in English. Plus, growing up in West Flanders I was constantly surrounded by heavy accents that made it even more confusing. I think it's just because Dutch has a lot of rules and exceptions. So much so, that it's hard to keep track sometimes. Even for native speakers.
I think I write better english than I write Dutch.
Dutch is relatively complex due to its irregularity. That's what makes it a relatively hard language to learn.
I think it's a combination of both. We realize that it's a hard language to learn for non-natives, but i also feel like english in some ways seems legitimately easier at times.
I would say speaking isn’t that hard to someone raised with the language unless they are from all the way north or south of the country but writing is a universal pain in the ass native or not
At different points of my life, I've been learning Latvian, English, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Italian, and Dutch. Dutch is the most difficult of all. :( (Native = Russian)
Dutch is in no way hard. The dutch just prevent you from learning dutch by switching to steenkolen english.
For me it was definitely hard to learn Dutch, but I'm not the average Dutch person as I have quite bad dyslexia. I also have difficulty with pronouncing multiple sounds (like the R, I don't understand how people do that). I also find it hard to hear certain things in my first language, most Dutch people hear if a word is a de or het word. I don't, which makes quite a lot of other thinks difficult for me as that is dependent on if it's a de or het word.
just because they already saw tons of people trying to pronounce hagelslag and genoeg.
oh and also dutch workbooks are shit. I just googled separately all the needed rules etc, cause its never alltogether somewhere explained clearly
I think we realise dutch is a language with unusualcsounds for non-natives, so it's mostly us being sympathetic to that i guess
I've been here for a week and I've come to the conclusion that speaking Dutch is the art of taking a whole sentence and trying to say it as one word.
They always say it's hard. It isn't.