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I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German. 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. --- 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. |