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by jillesvangurp
763 days ago
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I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German. Dutch dialects in the north of the country are very similar across the border. There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more. Mostly things are a lot simpler these days than they used to be. Older Dutch texts are hard to read even for Dutch people. Even texts from the 19th century look very different from modern Dutch. Finally, the reason English speakers recognize a lot of Dutch words is because a lot of English words actually have Dutch origins. For example, the word cookie is a bastardized form of the Dutch koekje. Especially a lot of naval jargon comes straight from Dutch. The reason for this is long trade relations, colonizing the same places (e.g. New York used to be New Amsterdam), etc. There even was a Dutch king on the British throne in the seventeenth century. |
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Well, it's another language... there is always going to be a learning curve, especially beyond a certain age. My wife is German and picked up Dutch pretty quickly. Vice versa, I lived in Germany for five years and even though I barely put in any effort (and we speak Dutch at home), I found German fairly easy to pick up.
There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more.
That's certainly true for case marking (with which Dutch often struggle with when speaking German), but again in terms of word order, grammatical gender, etc. they are still very similar and certainly more similar than Engish and Dutch are.
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English is much easier than German for most Dutch people for various reasons, including: more years of English education (starting during primary education, being mandatory up to VWO 6); subtitled movies; continuous exposure to English through media, internet, etc. The generation of my grandparents were often much better at German than English, they had a lot more exposure to German radio/television, travel was much less international, so they'd usually go to Germany, Belgium, or France when going abroad, etc.