Een kind kan de was doen
Zooo makkelijk
‘Why is Dutch so difficult?’
It is not the first - and certainly not the last - time I have been asked that question.
This time it is Naz from Iran who sighs despondently to underline her question.
I remind her of what she told me about her mother tongue Farsi: its sentences have no fixed order, and you must infer meaning mainly from context.
Dutch grammar is actually quite childproof, is my humble opinion. Inversion aside, sentences generally follow the fixed SVO structure: Subject-Verb-Object.
Our pronunciation is also pretty straightforward. Unlike English and French, we have few silent letters or clusters in our language. Nothing like the silent k- in the English words knitting, knock and knee, for instance.
Nor do we add sounds where there aren’t any written. Farsi or Spanish speakers, for instance, pronounce the Dutch word Spaans as èspaans.
Not so the Dutch. What you see is basically what you get.
‘That’s why you guys have such problems pronouncing psycholoog’, I remark with a hint of mischief.
Word formation rules are also straightforward: not only can you convert any noun into a verb by adding the suffix -en, e.g. netflixen, you can also create new words by combining several nouns.
Klimaatrouwceremonie, I read the other day in a Dutch newspaper. A cluster of no less than three nouns to convey what requires a full sentence in English: a ceremony to mourn the current state of the climate.
Ain’t that cool?
This illustrates that the word-formation principle in Dutch often follows the ironclad logic of a child. A magnifier? A glass that makes things look big (groot). Ergo: vergrootglas.
Binoculars? A device through which to look (kijken), ergo kijker. And in this case, the kijker enables you to see far. Hence, verrekijker.
Looking at the stars instead? Use a sterrenkijker.
Een kind kan de was doen (a child can do the laundry), the Dutch would say.
’Een Nederlands kind, misschien.’ (A Dutch child, maybe)
Naz emits another deep sigh.
I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language), mainly to internationals who came to Amsterdam for or with love and are here to stay. The conversations presented here were all held in Dutch. For privacy reasons the names are fictitious. Soon in the stores: my bilingual book Nederlands is zooo makkelijk | Dutch is sooo easy.
Lingo lingo
De grammatica - grammar
De zin - sentence
De woordvolgorde - word order
Het zelfstandig naamwoord - noun
Het werkwoord - verb
