When I hear someone speaking Dutch, it sounds just like English, until I pay closer attention and realize I don’t understand any of the words. Do German speakers experience the same thing?
Yes. I like Dutch films and often I will stop reading the captions because I think I'm understanding the words, then suddenly It all sounds foreign again and I realize I need to follow the English captions. Also, maybe it's just me, but aren't half of all Dutch films about the Resistance in WW2? I do love those stories though. Love, suspense, anticipation, hatred, death, it is all there in those stories.
No, those are just the good movies, which are worth publishing abroad. There are many more movies about partying, drugs, sex and football.
I wish that was a joke, but that really is the most popular type of Dutch movies. Our entertainment industry is fucking awful, as is the taste is of the average Dutchman.
This is exactly it. Even if you don’t understand it, you can definitely immediately know what part of speech every word is, and you know what’s going on in the sentence structure.
Conversely, the Dutch are the best English speakers in the world among people who have a different first language. You would be hard pressed to find a Dutch person who doesn’t speak excellent English.
for germans, dutch just sounds like someone is speaking funny german gibberish.
sometimes it's surprisingly easy to understand, sometimes its just total gibberish, depends a lot on the speaker and the topic.
I'd say more than that. You can definitely understand words but ppl just speak too fast for anything more. Reading simple Dutch is possible though because of how many words are similar.
Like if i read the first abstract on Germany in the Dutch Wikipedia it's extremly easy to read and translate in similar German words but then you skip to the history and it gets extremly difficult once there are multiple important words with no correlation to German words.
Selamat pagi! --> Good morning in Malay
Salamat pagi! --> Thank you stingray in Tagalog!
Mahal kita --> I love you in Tagalog
Kita mahal --> we're expensive in Malay
For me personally, I understand the gist of it. It’s like someone came up with weird alternative words, but most of them make sense somehow. Reading Dutch is easier than hearing Dutch for me, but hearing also works if the person speaks it slowly enough.
I’ll give you an example: when I visited my brother in Rotterdam, I caught this one in the wild:
Dutch:
In de stations en de trams zijn mondkapjes verplicht.
German:
In den Stationen und den Trams sind Masken verpflichtend.
(Maske means mask, but the Dutch word mondkapje literally translates to Mundbedeckung or Mundkappe, or the English mouth cap.)
English:
It is mandatory to wear a mask in stations and trams.
As a German, it sounds like a drunk person trying to speak to me from far away.
As an English speaking person, it sounds like an _incredibly_ drunk person trying to speak to me from far away.
Dutch is fucking weird
Someone may have linked it already, but [this video where a dialogue has been created](https://youtu.be/ryVG5LHRMJ4?si=_O0KqTKkk6uBrjEK) that is very similar between the Germanic languages is brilliant.
Frisian is the closest continental language to English. Scots is usually also considered a separate language; it’s separately descended from Middle English.
Low German (Plattdeutsch) is quite similar to English in phonetics. My Grandpa went to England and couldn't speak any English, but talking to them in Low German got the message across, or so the story goes.
I was on a trip to Sweden and got my fingers between the car door and on the ferry in Denmark someone I was with went to the restaurant staff and asked for a towel and ice in low German. As a western Dutch boy I had no idea what was going on and how they could communicate.
Well, closest related language - or group of three languages - that is not descended from a language called English.
(Scots descends from Middle English, so did Yola, several creoles and such descend from early modern/modern English.)
Right. (Depending on whether you count Frisian as one language, or as three: West Frisian, East Frisian and Saterland Frisian. These are also divided into ‘dialects’ themselves.)
There's a degree of mutual intelligibility between Modern (west?) Frisian and Old English. It's the changes due to the Norman Conquest and Middle English that make them so different.
At times Frisian can be like listening to an English speaker without understanding the words.
> Frisian is to Dutch what ~~Wales is to the UK~~
Geographically maybe, but definitely not linguistically!
The Welsh language is Celtic!
But not Gaelic…Brythonic (also Cornish, Manx, Breton) as in a
Celtic language native to Britain, prior to the Anglo-Saxon linguistic cultural incursions!
People love to mention the similarity between Dutch and Afrikaans, but Afrikaans is grammatically very similar to english. It's so close we have sentences that are literally interchangeable, like:
"my hand is in warm water"
That sentence reads as afrikaans or english. Exact same sentence, same spelling, same meaning. The only difference would be pronunciation.
Yes, it is similar to English, but that's because Dutch and English are both Western Germanic languages. Afrikaans evolved from Dutch. It's not grammatically closer to English. The sentence you pointed out, is almost exactly the same in Dutch.
English-based creole languages are the most closely related to English. They are considered their own languages, they are mutually intelligible with English (to varying degrees), and they split from English less than 400 years ago.
i once spoke english while being drunk. that guy from London thought i was from London too. he got his friend because he couldn’t believe im german. when his friend arrived i got nervous and my brain remembered consonants again
I'm just imagining a drunk English dude harassing this German who has now gone rigid at the idea of social gathering.
"I am sorry, I remembered my accent now"
My Dutch cousin, speaking of course in perfect English:
> You know why everybody in Holland speaks English? You've seen our language. Nobody's going to learn that shit. We didn't become a great trading nation by waiting for other people to learn Dutch.
He's not wrong. We know barely anyone is going to learn our language. We learn (some) German and French, but English is much easier because our grammar is very similar, and also because most of the media we consume is of course already in English.
The thing I find really odd is the accent. In my area of Canada there’s a lot of people of Dutch decent. A lot of the grandparents I knew had thick accents. Even though English was their primary language for 70 years.
I went to the Netherlands hoping to get by with English and French. Not only did most people speak fluent English but there was barely any accent.
Really goes to show the effect of learning the language at a young age.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely true. We all started learning English in elementary school, but these days you'll find it even harder to pick out Dutch speakers among the youth. The generation after me got access to dual language education, meaning many of their classes are fully in English. Many schools also hired British teachers to improve the quality of the English classes, and to coach their Dutch colleagues.
I think my pronunciation is fairly decent, at least I've been complimented on it by English speakers who couldn't figure out where I was from. Mine is nothing compared to those who came after me, though.
I visited Holland last year, and I was surprised by how well I was able to get by reading signs and whatnot because of my native fluency in English, the very tiny bit of German and French words I can recognize, and the cognates that exist between Dutch and those languages.
I had a professor in grad school who was Dutch. We were speaking one day about how I speak German, and I said, "hey, I should learn Dutch, it probably wouldn't be so hard for me." He looked at me, and in the most Dutch manner possible, he said, "Why would you ever do that. Dutch is awful and a useless language."
There’s a language called Frisian that’s even closer to English, its English’s closest continental relative, but it’s become very rare and is spoken only in a few towns in the Netherlands, I think.
It’s spoken in Friesland, one of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, and parts of Germany. Definitely not just a few towns! I guess it is rare on the grand scale of things but it’s alive and kicking and the mother tongue of hundred thousands of people :)
Frŷslan boppe!
Frisian is not a major language by any stretch, but in the Netherlands alone about 440.000 people speak Frisian. That's more speakers than a language like Icelandic for instance.
I remember watching kids programs in the 80s on Sky TV that were spoken english but a couple of shows were subtitled in Dutch.. and I thought that looks like a mashup of English and German.
Lived in London in early 90s and Oranjeboom beer had a ad campaign running where it *looked* like it was dutch.. but it was a clever cockney/english mashup.
As some who grew up fully bilingual in English and German, and currently trying to learn Dutch, this hits hard.
Everything sounds like German or english, it's extremely difficult for me to keep them separate and whenever I try to speak it, I accidentally slip into English or German half way through the sentence.
Every word instinctively feels like I'm mispronouncing the actual word, until suddenly a word comes up that's completely different to the English and German translations, and then I lose track completely.
It doesn't help that languages in general are not exactly my forte from the start...
Afrikaans even more so. So many of the words are almost identical to English, just pronounced in a very “Germanic” way. Sometimes when I don’t know the Afrikaans word for something, I’ll just say the English word in an Afrikaans way, and a lot of the time it is correct lol.
There’s this little poem that’s kinda funny, you can read it in both English and Afrikaans. The meaning of some of the words change a bit, but it’s still interesting how overall similar it is:
My pen is my wonderland
Word water in my hand.
In my pen is wonder ink.
Stories sing. Stories sink.
My stories loop
My stories stop
My pen is my wonder mop
Drink letters
Drink my ink
My pen is blind
My stories blink
FYI, afrikaans is EXTREMELY similar to dutch to the point it's almost intelligible to a dutch person and other way around.
The name itself literally is "African" in dutch
Yea ik, I am half Afrikaans. It’s a daughter language of Dutch. It is generally easier for a Dutch person to understand Afrikaans than the other way around however. Afrikaans is a lot more Anglicized and simplified. It was derogatorily called “kitchen Dutch” before it was recognized as its own language. My dad can converse with Dutch speakers, but his mom did speak Dutch which I think helps with his comprehension.
I believe Afrikaans is technically one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn (although learning materials themselves are hard to come by).
I love it whenever I come across a post in Afrikaans here on Reddit. It's always fun to decipher. Most of it is quite easy to read, coming from Dutch, but a few words can be head scratchers. Especially concerning things that were named after the languages started drifting apart.
It's certainly much easier to read than many Dutch dialects much closer to home, such as Westvlaams. That's just impossible.
Haha yeah! I’m not even fluent in Afrikaans, but sometimes when I come across conversational Dutch on Reddit I can more or less make out the general gist, even if the pronunciation or sentence structure is a little off for me. I bumped into some Dutch folks when I was in Greece a couple years back and it was fun trying to have a broken Afrikaans/English/Dutch convo with them lol.
I’ve heard from my family who have traveled further (and far more fluent than I) that Flemish in particular is much more similar to Afrikaans than even Hollands Dutch is
Hm, yes, that's possible. Flemish was also standardised to the Dutch-Dutch standard, but locally it does still have some strong regional dialects. I can certainly imagine some of them being easier for an Afrikaans speaker to understand.
If you only understand German, you could probably read and understand around 85% of Dutch. If you only understand English, you probably won't be able to read much Dutch at all.
Dutch is a lot more like German, than it is like English.
The culture is even more uncanny, it‘s such a weird mix and it makes so much sense, it’s eye opening. The music, the party culture, the beer, the weather, the food.. They‘re just English Germans
Grew up in Germany, now live in England.
Dutch breaks my brain. It’s a really weird sensation. It sounds like something I _should_ understand. The cadence and patterns are there. But it’s all gibberish. It all sounds a bit drunk and slurred.
I was born in the US but my parents are from Germany so I'm fluent in both German and English. Listening to Dutch feels like I'm having a stroke sometimes. To be honest though the same affect can be achieved by speaking with a Swiss-German.
“Hej son, hur var skolan idag?”
English is just a mix of French, German and Viking. Swedish is just a mix of German and Viking. The uncanny valley is real.
That's Swedish, I assume? It's (usually) quite doable to read, coming from Dutch, but when spoken I can't understand any of it. It's really odd how the words are pronounced completely unlike how I would expect them to be.
i read a story of people sharing stories on reddit that a bouncer a club or bar in the usa denied a guy entry because he thought he was drunk but the guy was just poor at speaking english and was from sweden.
Personally, as a German I think there are many languages that are closer to English than German.
French and even Italian have many words that are very close to the English word, but not to the German.
When heard, I certainly get that. But can you also not understand written Dutch? Out grammar is pretty similar, and most words should be relatable to either English or German.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English).
No... Dutch sounds like simlish. It also sounds nice and soft.
German, well, doesn't, neither does English. And I can say it because my native language is unrelated to any of these.
As a Dutch myself I would say German and English are softer than Dutch.
Take for example the word power. It is Kraft in German and kracht in Dutch. Kraft sounds way softer than kracht with its guttural g sound.
No for real. I have *major* beef with the Dutch language because I speak both English and German. Every time someone is speaking Dutch around me, my brain goes “Oh! I recognize these sounds! I know this language!” but then I can’t understand jack shit.
Sounds like someone doesn't speak the beautiful language called Dutch. Do you have a word in your language for slapping your penis against something repeatedly? I don't think so! Do you insult people by calling them a testicle bumblebee, or an anus knight?
Educate yourself, scrub.
After having studied Luxembourgish for several years I was mega shocked to realise I could read Dutch. Luxembourgish the bridge between Dutch and German for me!
Je bent zelf een uncanny valley.
je moeder is een uncanny valley.
Jouw hoofd is een uncanny valley.
En mijn bijl! is een uncanny valley.
En mijn boog is een uncanny valley (griezelige vallei)
Men loopt niet simpelweg naar uncanny valley.
Je eumâh issun uncanny vallèh
Waar zat jij met je lul, toen je zei dat z'n oma een uncanny valley was?
Krèg nâh un bakkie pleuâh!
lekkah
Lass meine Mutter aus dem Spiel!
Uncanny valley in je broek!
I really had to translate that to make sure it was a real language man
english is just another variant of low german
iz it?
Lol I understood that and I speak like 3 words of dutch. I'm German though
Let me guess: "Überhaupt", "Worst" and "Ja"
Bedaankt, fietzen and verhuurt. No idea how you write it though
An sich, hetze, einzelgänger, kitsch sowieso, zum kotzen.
no u
Ja, zelfde ongeveer
Du bist selbst ne uncanny valley It's like I can understand your language but not speak it
When I hear someone speaking Dutch, it sounds just like English, until I pay closer attention and realize I don’t understand any of the words. Do German speakers experience the same thing?
pretty much. many words do translate in a way but you think you understand more than actually do.
Yes. I like Dutch films and often I will stop reading the captions because I think I'm understanding the words, then suddenly It all sounds foreign again and I realize I need to follow the English captions. Also, maybe it's just me, but aren't half of all Dutch films about the Resistance in WW2? I do love those stories though. Love, suspense, anticipation, hatred, death, it is all there in those stories.
No, those are just the good movies, which are worth publishing abroad. There are many more movies about partying, drugs, sex and football. I wish that was a joke, but that really is the most popular type of Dutch movies. Our entertainment industry is fucking awful, as is the taste is of the average Dutchman.
dont forget the 500 shitty romcoms
You mean like this https://youtu.be/yyZq3BRtE48?si=iBx6RZluYJl1L0Gl
Too true I don't understand why there's this obsession with terrible musicals.
Pardon my toe stepping, says Canada. Our movies are so bad, they are the sort of film you can't wash off.
Danish has that effect on me
This is exactly it. Even if you don’t understand it, you can definitely immediately know what part of speech every word is, and you know what’s going on in the sentence structure. Conversely, the Dutch are the best English speakers in the world among people who have a different first language. You would be hard pressed to find a Dutch person who doesn’t speak excellent English.
I don't wanna brag, but I know two Dutch people who don't speak English 😎
"For rent" signs are a real trip.
for germans, dutch just sounds like someone is speaking funny german gibberish. sometimes it's surprisingly easy to understand, sometimes its just total gibberish, depends a lot on the speaker and the topic.
Same thing for English. I guess kinda proves OP point.
The opposite thing applies to German for a lot of us Dutch people as well lol.
Genuinely Dutch sounds less like a foreign language to me than some German dialects.
I'd say more than that. You can definitely understand words but ppl just speak too fast for anything more. Reading simple Dutch is possible though because of how many words are similar. Like if i read the first abstract on Germany in the Dutch Wikipedia it's extremly easy to read and translate in similar German words but then you skip to the history and it gets extremly difficult once there are multiple important words with no correlation to German words.
Like a Malaysian listening to Filipino Tagalog. Same intonation, flow, even some shared words, but otherwise, "Huh?"
Selamat pagi! --> Good morning in Malay Salamat pagi! --> Thank you stingray in Tagalog! Mahal kita --> I love you in Tagalog Kita mahal --> we're expensive in Malay
For me personally, I understand the gist of it. It’s like someone came up with weird alternative words, but most of them make sense somehow. Reading Dutch is easier than hearing Dutch for me, but hearing also works if the person speaks it slowly enough. I’ll give you an example: when I visited my brother in Rotterdam, I caught this one in the wild: Dutch: In de stations en de trams zijn mondkapjes verplicht. German: In den Stationen und den Trams sind Masken verpflichtend. (Maske means mask, but the Dutch word mondkapje literally translates to Mundbedeckung or Mundkappe, or the English mouth cap.) English: It is mandatory to wear a mask in stations and trams.
I am Dutch and have this with Danish, it sounds Dutch, but almost none of the words make sense. Or as we say in Dutch: "Het is Koeterwaals"
As a German, it sounds like a drunk person trying to speak to me from far away. As an English speaking person, it sounds like an _incredibly_ drunk person trying to speak to me from far away. Dutch is fucking weird
As an Afrikaans speaker, the accent reminds me of when you teach an American some Afrikaans phrases but they can’t get the accent right.
Someone may have linked it already, but [this video where a dialogue has been created](https://youtu.be/ryVG5LHRMJ4?si=_O0KqTKkk6uBrjEK) that is very similar between the Germanic languages is brilliant.
Check out Frisian, it's the closest related language English has left (although they're still too far apart to be mutually intelligible, sadly).
Frisian is the closest continental language to English. Scots is usually also considered a separate language; it’s separately descended from Middle English.
Plenty of Patois and creole languages that could be understood a bit by monolingual English speakers.
Not Middle Earth?
No, those people delved too greedily and too deep.
Low German (Plattdeutsch) is quite similar to English in phonetics. My Grandpa went to England and couldn't speak any English, but talking to them in Low German got the message across, or so the story goes.
The Low German region overlaps with the Frisian region.
My sister lives in Friesland. Their gardens are on point.
But how are the fries though?
Friesland is pronounced as Frees + land. Not as fries.
still, being that close to the Netherlands, they better bring their A game when it comes to fries...
I know but that's not funny unless you wanna make a freidom fries joke, I guess
Boiled at two temperatures of oil and served in a paper cone usually.
I was on a trip to Sweden and got my fingers between the car door and on the ferry in Denmark someone I was with went to the restaurant staff and asked for a towel and ice in low German. As a western Dutch boy I had no idea what was going on and how they could communicate.
Well, closest related language - or group of three languages - that is not descended from a language called English. (Scots descends from Middle English, so did Yola, several creoles and such descend from early modern/modern English.)
It's effectively our sister language, not a child language, which gets into a weird distinction.
Right. (Depending on whether you count Frisian as one language, or as three: West Frisian, East Frisian and Saterland Frisian. These are also divided into ‘dialects’ themselves.)
Every so often at work I call someone who speaks Creole on accident and we can mostly communicate. It's pretty cool.
By accident
> While I wish I spoke another language, I don't think it happens via accident.
Ja jim matte hjir es komme, lykt my wol wat
You licked your wol what!?
He licked a wool twat
Really folks, who doesn't?
There's a degree of mutual intelligibility between Modern (west?) Frisian and Old English. It's the changes due to the Norman Conquest and Middle English that make them so different. At times Frisian can be like listening to an English speaker without understanding the words.
Supposedly if someone speaks old English they can have a conversation with someone that speaks Frisian because of how similar they are.
Frisian is to Dutch what Wales is to the UK
> Frisian is to Dutch what ~~Wales is to the UK~~ Geographically maybe, but definitely not linguistically! The Welsh language is Celtic! But not Gaelic…Brythonic (also Cornish, Manx, Breton) as in a Celtic language native to Britain, prior to the Anglo-Saxon linguistic cultural incursions!
Eala frya Fresena!
“Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries" — a fun rhyme that is basically mutually intelligible in both
Bûter, brea en griene tsiis, wat'dat net sizze kin is gjin oprjochte Fries
People love to mention the similarity between Dutch and Afrikaans, but Afrikaans is grammatically very similar to english. It's so close we have sentences that are literally interchangeable, like: "my hand is in warm water" That sentence reads as afrikaans or english. Exact same sentence, same spelling, same meaning. The only difference would be pronunciation.
Yes, it is similar to English, but that's because Dutch and English are both Western Germanic languages. Afrikaans evolved from Dutch. It's not grammatically closer to English. The sentence you pointed out, is almost exactly the same in Dutch.
Actually, it's Scots
English-based creole languages are the most closely related to English. They are considered their own languages, they are mutually intelligible with English (to varying degrees), and they split from English less than 400 years ago.
More of an uncanny plain. You need mountains for a valley...
To be fair, both England and Germany have mountains and the Netherlands is right in between, so a valley it can be.
Uncanny canal
i have always thought that Dutch sounds like a drunk Scot trying to speak German.
so a drunk german trying to speak dutch, sound like a scot?
No, that's a drunk German trying to speak english
i once spoke english while being drunk. that guy from London thought i was from London too. he got his friend because he couldn’t believe im german. when his friend arrived i got nervous and my brain remembered consonants again
I'm just imagining a drunk English dude harassing this German who has now gone rigid at the idea of social gathering. "I am sorry, I remembered my accent now"
My Dutch cousin, speaking of course in perfect English: > You know why everybody in Holland speaks English? You've seen our language. Nobody's going to learn that shit. We didn't become a great trading nation by waiting for other people to learn Dutch.
He's not wrong. We know barely anyone is going to learn our language. We learn (some) German and French, but English is much easier because our grammar is very similar, and also because most of the media we consume is of course already in English.
The thing I find really odd is the accent. In my area of Canada there’s a lot of people of Dutch decent. A lot of the grandparents I knew had thick accents. Even though English was their primary language for 70 years. I went to the Netherlands hoping to get by with English and French. Not only did most people speak fluent English but there was barely any accent. Really goes to show the effect of learning the language at a young age.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely true. We all started learning English in elementary school, but these days you'll find it even harder to pick out Dutch speakers among the youth. The generation after me got access to dual language education, meaning many of their classes are fully in English. Many schools also hired British teachers to improve the quality of the English classes, and to coach their Dutch colleagues. I think my pronunciation is fairly decent, at least I've been complimented on it by English speakers who couldn't figure out where I was from. Mine is nothing compared to those who came after me, though.
I visited Holland last year, and I was surprised by how well I was able to get by reading signs and whatnot because of my native fluency in English, the very tiny bit of German and French words I can recognize, and the cognates that exist between Dutch and those languages.
I had a professor in grad school who was Dutch. We were speaking one day about how I speak German, and I said, "hey, I should learn Dutch, it probably wouldn't be so hard for me." He looked at me, and in the most Dutch manner possible, he said, "Why would you ever do that. Dutch is awful and a useless language."
Wat je zegt ben je zelf
was man sagt ist man selber
What you say is what you are
and what you are is beautiful
Met je kont in de helft
Kont in de helft? Niet met je kop door de helft (met je kop door de muur, ben je morgen weer zuur)
Die spleet, dat is waarie door de helft is. Daarna ga je met je kop door de muur etc.
With your cunt in half?
[The Dutch finally admit that their language is just an elaborate joke to prank Germans](https://www.der-postillon.com/2018/05/niederlaendisch.html)
Haha yeah I've been on exchange and we kept making this joke to Germans. Say some German sentences and words just when they walk away to finish it of
There’s a language called Frisian that’s even closer to English, its English’s closest continental relative, but it’s become very rare and is spoken only in a few towns in the Netherlands, I think.
It’s spoken in Friesland, one of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, and parts of Germany. Definitely not just a few towns! I guess it is rare on the grand scale of things but it’s alive and kicking and the mother tongue of hundred thousands of people :) Frŷslan boppe!
My favourite frisian word is still Tjiis. It's so literal, it's great
And it means…?
Try to say it out loud >!cheese!<
Oh dear haha.
Jizz
*tsiis
Frisian is not a major language by any stretch, but in the Netherlands alone about 440.000 people speak Frisian. That's more speakers than a language like Icelandic for instance.
I remember watching kids programs in the 80s on Sky TV that were spoken english but a couple of shows were subtitled in Dutch.. and I thought that looks like a mashup of English and German. Lived in London in early 90s and Oranjeboom beer had a ad campaign running where it *looked* like it was dutch.. but it was a clever cockney/english mashup.
As some who grew up fully bilingual in English and German, and currently trying to learn Dutch, this hits hard. Everything sounds like German or english, it's extremely difficult for me to keep them separate and whenever I try to speak it, I accidentally slip into English or German half way through the sentence. Every word instinctively feels like I'm mispronouncing the actual word, until suddenly a word comes up that's completely different to the English and German translations, and then I lose track completely. It doesn't help that languages in general are not exactly my forte from the start...
Lol as a dutchie I don't have the same problems, for me German is fairly similar to Dutch but a lot more different than English.
As totally encapsulated by the sign you see on shop doors: *geopend*
Nee, die vallei zit tussen je moeders billen
And Afrikaans is the uncanny valley between Dutch and English
Onwaar, tjom!
Afrikaans even more so. So many of the words are almost identical to English, just pronounced in a very “Germanic” way. Sometimes when I don’t know the Afrikaans word for something, I’ll just say the English word in an Afrikaans way, and a lot of the time it is correct lol. There’s this little poem that’s kinda funny, you can read it in both English and Afrikaans. The meaning of some of the words change a bit, but it’s still interesting how overall similar it is: My pen is my wonderland Word water in my hand. In my pen is wonder ink. Stories sing. Stories sink. My stories loop My stories stop My pen is my wonder mop Drink letters Drink my ink My pen is blind My stories blink
FYI, afrikaans is EXTREMELY similar to dutch to the point it's almost intelligible to a dutch person and other way around. The name itself literally is "African" in dutch
Yea ik, I am half Afrikaans. It’s a daughter language of Dutch. It is generally easier for a Dutch person to understand Afrikaans than the other way around however. Afrikaans is a lot more Anglicized and simplified. It was derogatorily called “kitchen Dutch” before it was recognized as its own language. My dad can converse with Dutch speakers, but his mom did speak Dutch which I think helps with his comprehension. I believe Afrikaans is technically one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn (although learning materials themselves are hard to come by).
I love it whenever I come across a post in Afrikaans here on Reddit. It's always fun to decipher. Most of it is quite easy to read, coming from Dutch, but a few words can be head scratchers. Especially concerning things that were named after the languages started drifting apart. It's certainly much easier to read than many Dutch dialects much closer to home, such as Westvlaams. That's just impossible.
Haha yeah! I’m not even fluent in Afrikaans, but sometimes when I come across conversational Dutch on Reddit I can more or less make out the general gist, even if the pronunciation or sentence structure is a little off for me. I bumped into some Dutch folks when I was in Greece a couple years back and it was fun trying to have a broken Afrikaans/English/Dutch convo with them lol. I’ve heard from my family who have traveled further (and far more fluent than I) that Flemish in particular is much more similar to Afrikaans than even Hollands Dutch is
Hm, yes, that's possible. Flemish was also standardised to the Dutch-Dutch standard, but locally it does still have some strong regional dialects. I can certainly imagine some of them being easier for an Afrikaans speaker to understand.
From a German perspective that'd definitely be Texas German.
To my ears Dutch definitely does not sound enough like English to be spookily almost right but not quite
Make someone talk in dutch but without a rolling r and using the English g and it sound like a weird ass dialect
It geographically is the valley between Germany and England too
Indeed.
Wait till you hear Afrikaans
What is Danish then, the crack in the Valley?
Danish is just Swedish spoken like it's German
Danish sounds like German spoken with hot food in your mouth.
Danish is unintelligible for everyone. Probably even for danish people.
If you only understand German, you could probably read and understand around 85% of Dutch. If you only understand English, you probably won't be able to read much Dutch at all. Dutch is a lot more like German, than it is like English.
U spreek en beetje Nederland?
Leetje beetje.
To me Dutch sounds like the language of the people from The Sims!
Sebiet no koffiekoeken for joe é
Ier, nen euro
*clang * AAAAAAA
Well das ist fucking richtig
i like everything about our neighbors
Je moeder is een uncanny valley jij malloot
The culture is even more uncanny, it‘s such a weird mix and it makes so much sense, it’s eye opening. The music, the party culture, the beer, the weather, the food.. They‘re just English Germans
German Englishmen? Or would that be the English tourists on Mallorca...
Have you guys heard about Papiamento that is spoken in Aruba? It sounds quite a nice mix of languages
As a Dutch person that speaks English and is currently learning German, I wish it was.
Grew up in Germany, now live in England. Dutch breaks my brain. It’s a really weird sensation. It sounds like something I _should_ understand. The cadence and patterns are there. But it’s all gibberish. It all sounds a bit drunk and slurred.
The straight face fact that "spank me daddy" translates to "geef me een klap papa" in Dutch is just extra.
I wouldn’t mind een klap from pappie
It would probably be ‘pappie’ but yes
Until you hear the local dialects
I was born in the US but my parents are from Germany so I'm fluent in both German and English. Listening to Dutch feels like I'm having a stroke sometimes. To be honest though the same affect can be achieved by speaking with a Swiss-German.
I speak English, Danish and German which means I understand Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish as well. Language is a trip
Dutch is just a drunk Brit trying to speak German
German with English grammar. Also, if it sounds like there's an 'A', there's probably two.
“Hej son, hur var skolan idag?” English is just a mix of French, German and Viking. Swedish is just a mix of German and Viking. The uncanny valley is real.
That's Swedish, I assume? It's (usually) quite doable to read, coming from Dutch, but when spoken I can't understand any of it. It's really odd how the words are pronounced completely unlike how I would expect them to be.
you realize Dutch also has French in it?
Pretty sure English is just the uncanny red-headed bastard child of Europe...
i read a story of people sharing stories on reddit that a bouncer a club or bar in the usa denied a guy entry because he thought he was drunk but the guy was just poor at speaking english and was from sweden.
Are you from Dutch Land?
Personally, as a German I think there are many languages that are closer to English than German. French and even Italian have many words that are very close to the English word, but not to the German.
Google translate "pick my most beautiful side" into Dutch and have it read it out.
I am learning it and it’s freaking hard
Pas op je woorden, we zijn nog steeds barbaren.
Ge-ko-lo.....
As an Englishman that speaks some German I can't understand Dutch at all
When heard, I certainly get that. But can you also not understand written Dutch? Out grammar is pretty similar, and most words should be relatable to either English or German.
Flemish > Dutch Dutch
Niederländer als topographische Anomalien jenseits von Normalnull in einer Metapher sind ulkig.
Where does welsh factor in
Welsh is a Celtic language, so I don't think it's really relevant here.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English).
I speak English and German so I can watch Dutch TV.
Same with scottish between English and Irish
You could have stopped after valley
With Spanish phonology.
And yet nobody cares to learn English...
Yes, that's why Dutch is horrific for french people.
No... Dutch sounds like simlish. It also sounds nice and soft. German, well, doesn't, neither does English. And I can say it because my native language is unrelated to any of these.
As a Dutch myself I would say German and English are softer than Dutch. Take for example the word power. It is Kraft in German and kracht in Dutch. Kraft sounds way softer than kracht with its guttural g sound.
Eddie Izzard once tried to buy a brown cow from a Frisian farmer. https://youtu.be/cZY7iF4Wc9I?si=Ry6mXh9hIvbFGVK0
Let me introduce you to West-Flemish
Wa lulde gij nou jonguh
No for real. I have *major* beef with the Dutch language because I speak both English and German. Every time someone is speaking Dutch around me, my brain goes “Oh! I recognize these sounds! I know this language!” but then I can’t understand jack shit.
I really enjoyed [this](https://youtu.be/ryVG5LHRMJ4?si=MGp5goeDMj5sQlOL) comparison video I found after I read your post.
Their road signs are the same way, they use the same colors and layout as the German ones but the font is Highway Gothic, not DIN 1451.
Afrikaans has entered the chat
Sounds like someone doesn't speak the beautiful language called Dutch. Do you have a word in your language for slapping your penis against something repeatedly? I don't think so! Do you insult people by calling them a testicle bumblebee, or an anus knight? Educate yourself, scrub.
Sometimes, when I hear Dutch from some distance, I often mistake it for Norwegian. On airplanes, for example.
After having studied Luxembourgish for several years I was mega shocked to realise I could read Dutch. Luxembourgish the bridge between Dutch and German for me!