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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| CelticBasque Newbie United States Joined 4593 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 1 of 5 12 October 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged |
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Just wondering how similar is Afrikaans to Dutch? And just how easy is Afrikaans for a
native English speaker? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 5 12 October 2012 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
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If someone speaks Afrikaans I can understand them, but I have to respond in Dutch. I can
also read all the material written in it without really having had much exposure at all. Afrikaans is as easy as you make it out to be. I'd say there are a fair number of cognates and from what I know the grammar is quite simplified in terms of morphology, but I'm sure you'll have to deal with irregular idiomatics and whatnot to make up for it. I don't know about pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 5 12 October 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
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My exposure to Afrikaans is pretty limited, but I hope to study it further at some
point. After repeatedly hearing that Afrikaans is a breeze for English speakers, the whole Time/Manner/Place sentence structure is, well, quite unnatural for us and probably takes a lot of practice and exposure to overcome. That said, it seems to be quite regular in usage. I also had mentioned in a previous Afrikaans thread that I thought that pronunciation was somewhat difficult when paired with its spelling. The spelling is, in my opinion, deceptive. Certainly not as bad as for someone learning English as a foreign language, but I imagine it's a similar feeling. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 12 October 2012 at 5:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4667 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 4 of 5 13 October 2012 at 12:24am | IP Logged |
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Afrikaans sounds like a Bavarian dialect of German. :)
It does not sound like Flemish or Holland's Dutch. It's very soft, with an alveolar R and A's sound almost like O's. Edited by Medulin on 13 October 2012 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5923 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 5 of 5 13 October 2012 at 10:22am | IP Logged |
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Afrikaaans and Dutch are very similar, there is a lot of shared vocabulary. I would say that Afrikaans is an easy language for English speakers to learn. The spelling is a little more phonetic than Dutch or English and there is also some shared vocabulary with English. Some of the vowel sounds are unfamiliar to speakers of Engliah or Dutch but they actually aren't too difficult if you listen to a lot of spoken Afrikaans from the start and practice pronouncing them. The "r" is always rolled, and the hard "g" sound takes a while for English speakers to learn but Dutch has the same sound.
The word order of Afrikaans is unnatural for English speakers at first, unless you already know some Dutch, but because it is quite regular I got used to the structure pretty quickly by reading Afrikaans. Edited by mick33 on 13 October 2012 at 10:26am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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