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Passive knowledge of German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| galoshes Newbie Australia Joined 5583 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Dutch | Message 1 of 10 20 July 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
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I am learning Dutch at the moment and also speak some Swedish (and English, obviously). I am wondering, if I reach a high level of Dutch, would this give me a good understanding of written German/German grammar, even if not helping me to speak the language? I would like to be able to understand German texts (song lyrics) but do not really want to learn German, as I think I would get confused with it being similar to Dutch. Or are the two languages not really similar enough to cause confusion? (Compared with Swedish and Danish, for example)
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| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5781 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 2 of 10 20 July 2010 at 2:45pm | IP Logged |
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Yep.
With my learning Swedish I find these days I understand quite a few words in German films and Dutch is even closer to German. Germans call Dutch baby German. They are quite similar. English+German=Dutch. Sort of. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Slovak_anglo Diglot Groupie United States facebook.com/deliver Joined 5344 days ago 87 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Slovak | Message 3 of 10 20 July 2010 at 2:48pm | IP Logged |
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Well German grammer is more complex than dutch, at least I think so. I mean I understand some dutch but its not by reading its by sound... for example
Dutch: de vrijheid German: die Freiheit Both mean freedom and they sound very similar(in my opinion), but they look different. It does get more complicated. Some words look the same as a German word, but mean something different. All in all, German is extra cases and another gender(plus different vocab) and it would take some effort to understand even simple things. Hope this helps a little, S_A 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5326 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 10 20 July 2010 at 9:18pm | IP Logged |
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You could learn both without much confusion. But yes, Dutch would help you understand a lot of German.
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 5 of 10 21 July 2010 at 1:04pm | IP Logged |
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German grammar doesn't impede understanding, really. It's just extra rules for making correct utterances, and occasionally lets you express a phrase in a shorter or more subtle way, but if someone knew lots of German vocabulary and almost no German grammar, they'd still understand a lot.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5351 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 10 21 July 2010 at 3:34pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, it is easy. Dutch is sort of a half way point between English and German, and thus, by knowing English, German and a few rules, it becomes very easy to "guess" what the German equivalent of a word is. For example:
English: Round Hound Dutch: Rond Hond German: Rund Hund Now these are just easy examples, but I think you can see a clear pattern. This holds for many words between English, German and Dutch, and then with words which are not found in English, there are still many similarities: Dutch: leven blijven German: leben bleiben As someone who learned German and is studying Dutch, I find that I can usually understand the Dutch audio exercises in my learner books pretty well, just from the similarities between them and German. On the other hand, when it gets to faster and more complex speech, I find it much harder to understand Dutch, though part of me thinks that it is just about tuning my ear to the different manner in which these people talk and pronounce the words, compared to in German. Reading would be very easy though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7145 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 7 of 10 22 July 2010 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
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When I lived in Germany I found I could understand some Dutch radio programs almost perfectly. Others I hardly understood at all. I think it depended somewhat on the subject matter but I think it was mainly the choice of the speaker's words. If they spoke simply and to the point I understood OK but when they tried to be eloquent I had problems.
I understood written Dutch quite well. You just have to know a few rules of Dutch spelling and pronunciation. My opinion was that Dutch is half way between German and English. I think as you go back a few centuries the three languages merge somewhat. So, it should work the other way round, but I am not sure if it will work as well. The best way to find out is to try it for yourself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5644 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 8 of 10 22 July 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged |
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I can understand quite alot of written Dutch even though I've never tried to learn it. I have a Dutch friend who I speak to in English and German though sometime she speaks to me in Dutch and I understand the entire sentence about half the time and nearly always the gist. =)
It seems often to translate almost word to word from German although the grammar in German is more complicated, German has genders and cases but again you don't need to understand that really to understand German. All you really need to know is that der/die/das/den/dem all mean the and that ein/eine/eines/einem/einen all mean a =) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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