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Sirkka’s Dutch & French & More Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4543 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 9 of 12 23 March 2012 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cool to see a log from a fellow learner in Dutch! You have a nice mix of languages on your plate there.
I'm curious: as a native German speaker, how do you/did you feel about pronouncing the diphthongs (eu, ui, etc.)? Sometimes I'm still not sure if I'm saying ui correctly in a word. It seems to have a few different pronunciations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4547 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 10 of 12 23 March 2012 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I started learning German I found the pronunciation mostly logical. I believe there is only one sound that really bugs me in German and that's the weak "ch" and I occasionally don't stress a word properly. Your vowel sounds and diphthongs mostly have cognates in our language, or we're used to them from English (which is generally the preferred foreign lingo) so the problem in pronunciation is usually vice versa. (The Dutch like devoicing a little too much, though, so I doubt it's hard to detect a Dutchman speaking German).
The tricky bit for Dutch people in adapting to German is getting used to the cases, which disappeared from our language a while back and thus are unfamiliar to any Dutchman born post WWII. The syntax is also similar, but slightly different which means that we cannot exactly use Dutch word order, but we always switch a few things - leading to comprehensible sentences but improper German. The cases are usually what people are annoyed by the most and which gives it its perceived difficulty in Dutch eyes. Vocabulary is also very similar. There are a bunch of false friends, though. I would say that apart from English, German is the easiest language for me to speak without being completely looked at quizzically. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sirkka Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 5486 days ago 35 posts - 39 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Sign Language, Russian, Dutch, Esperanto, Thai, Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 12 23 March 2012 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Hekje: Dutch diphthongs are not difficult per se for a native speaker of German - once you get used to the fact
that some of them have no equivalent in German. -ui is a very good example: Without proper listening, one might mistake it for the German -au sound. It's a different sound though, which does not exist in German as such. It takes some practice to get those sounds right, and a lot of listening to Dutch audio, but for me as a German speaker I would say it's definitely doable. @tarvos: Thanks for your input, which was very helpful. I would second what you said about syntax and vocabulary. The many similarities always give me sort of like a "homey" feeling with Dutch, although I've barely started studying the language. I think I will work through some more lessons in my "Nederlands voor Duitstaligen" book and then try to write some Dutch log entries. Gotta start using the language at some point! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4528 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 12 of 12 20 April 2012 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm so glad I found this explanation! The moment I read it, it clicked for me (I studied Norwegian in a past life). It sounds like I have some refining to do to get the exact sound, but this is a good place to start. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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