Sure, I am Always Talkin’ Food, but I teach NT2 (Dutch as a second language) on the side. Mainly to young foreigners who came to Amsterdam for or with love and intend to stay. For privacy reasons the names in these columns are fictitious.
The absolute nightmare of every one of my Dutch students is just two letters in size.
It is a small word that looks as innocent as it is treacherous. One that can perform no less than five different functions in a Dutch sentence.
And sometimes several in one go.
A word that, moreover, is often barely noticeable when pronounced by the Dutch.
Er.
As soon as I announce that we are going to practice using er (again), a shiver of terror passes through the group.
No, not er! Anything but er.
No matter how often we exercise, and in how many different ways, er always remains a weak spot.
But unlike that other Achilles heel, the separable verbs whose prepositions are sometimes firmly fixed and sometimes rudely separated, er can hardly be avoided in Dutch.
At least, if you really want to sound Dutch.
And who doesn’t?
After all, for every separable verb there’s roughly one unseparable equivalent at hand. My students will gladly talk about rennen instead of hardlopen (running), for instance. About noteren instead of opschrijven (write down).
But it does get very cumbersome - and rather un-Dutch - to completely bypass er.
Come to think of it, er is as Dutch as it comes.
Think: Er is er één jarig. (It’s someone’s birthday.)
The fact that other languages - like French and Italian - have a word that performs more or less the same, is hardly any consolation.
Nor is the advice that I give my students to switch off their ratio and turn on their gut feeling when learning er.
Or Dutch, for that matter.
Because every time their gut tells them they are beginning to master this elusive little word, out of nowhere a Dutch colleague will ask an existential question like: “Wat is er?”*
Kyo from Tokyo sighs in defeat: ‘If even the Dutch don’t know what er is, how on earth will I ever?’
* ”Wat is er?” means “What’s the matter?”
Food lingo
(Savory) pancake - de (hartige) pannenkoek
Spring onion - de lenteui
Grilled, salted and filleted mackerel - de gegrilde, gezouten en gefileerde makreel
Elusive as the word er
According to statistics, Japanese restaurants are the fastest growing restaurant type in the Netherlands. Most of them focus on sushi or ramen noodles, but every now and then a little place opens up that calls itself ‘izakaya’ and serves bites like okonomiyaki (savory pancake), hokke (grilled, salted and filleted Atka mackerel from the seas around Hokkaido) or agedashi tofu (lightly deep-fried tofu in dashi broth with fluttering bonito flakes as elusive as the word er). Such a place is Kyo.
Restaurant Kyo, Koningsstraat 29 Amsterdam. Open: Tue-Sat 5 PM-10 PM.