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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5520 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 17 of 23 13 November 2009 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||
"don't have any need for it"? Don't you read books? (Strindberg, Lagerlöf, Heidenstam!) Or watch films? (You know who!) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6864 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 18 of 23 13 November 2009 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think if you know German, you'd pick up Dutch in no time. I don't have experience of Scandinavian languages.
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| Vinbelgium Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie Belgium Joined 5823 days ago 61 posts - 73 votes Speaks: Dutch*, Flemish*, English, French Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 19 of 23 13 November 2009 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, that is true. In my university are a lot of Germans who studied Dutch for a short while and decided to study here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6271 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 20 of 23 28 November 2009 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I found I could read Dutch to some extent while staying in Holland, based on knowledge of German and on learning hundreds of the most basic Dutch words. Understanding the spoken language was much harder.
During WW2, the Dutch resistance were reputedly worried about being infiltrated by German agents who had been trained to speak Dutch - although there were also Dutch Nazis to worry about as well. The resistance would ask people to pronounce tongue-twisters, in an attempt to flush out Germans. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SteveinTX Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5453 days ago 5 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch | Message 21 of 23 19 December 2009 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Not sure if I agree with the person who stated Swedish would be "easier" to learn if your native language was German vs. English. There may be many more cognates, especially between complex German and Swedish, but their grammars/stuctures are pretty far removed from one another and much more so than between English and Swedish.
I am native English speaker who learned Dutch in Belgium and The Netherlands s a teenager and I went to school in Holland. I took Swedish many years later at university level and all along kept up with my Dutch studies. I have had lots of exposure to nearly all Germanic languages except maybe Icelandic and Faroese. Here are my feelings on the relationship between the various Germanic languages to English. It is true that from a "relational" perspective, English is in the same sub-family as Dutch and German (West Germanic). The Scandinavian languages are "North Germanic". However, that more explains historical development than anything else and isn't always a good indicator of how "close" these languages are today. In fact, Old English texts like Beowulf show cognates to words that still exist in Dutch for example today but have been lost in English. Many of them have been replaced not just by French loan words but by obvious Old Norse influence as well. Most commonly spoken English words are Germanic in origin, and there are lots of cognates English shares with the Scandinavian languages as opposed to Dutch or German (tree, shirt, are, of, from, again, lift, and many others). Secondly, word order and sentence stucture in English are VERY similar to what one sees in the Scandinavian languages with some minor exceptions such as the suffixed definite article. English sentence stucture is not very similar to that of Dutch, for example, which shares the same general form and SOV word order as German. English also shares the same possessive "s" ending (albeit with an apostrophe) as the Scandinavian languages, which is foreign in Dutch. In my experience, the general flow of English seems much more like that of Swedish or Danish than it does Dutch, and I have significant experience with English, Swedish and Dutch. I had the experience of being able to both follow and form Swedish sentences much more naturally than Dutch, which took quite a bit more effort. German appears the farthest removed from English of the Germanic languages in terms of grammatical form and general stucture. Dutch is somewhat closer to English but not as close as many with little experience of the language seem to think. There are many cognates to be sure between Dutch and English (many are very similar in spelling and less so in pronounciation), but there are also lots of general cognates common to all Germanic languages. I will say that Dutch and German bear closer resemblance to the Scandinavian languages and each other in terms of compound words and the more complex language, as English was so heavily influenced by French, but that doesn't help most people to master everyday language. Grammatically, all Germnic languages including English are quite similar although again, in terms of both form and simplicity, English likens more to the Scandinavian languages than either German or Dutch in that area as well. One area of major difficulty for many English speakers learning Scandinavian languages, especially Danish or to a lesser degree Swedish and probbly the least so with Norwegian, is the unusual collection of sounds they have. Dutch and German will both be more familiar in thoe areas, particularly Dutch which normally has a liquid "l" and often a liquid "r" like English. Probably the two Dutch sounds that might pose the most difficulty for a native English speaker are the gutteral "g" and the "sch", the latter of which Germans can't pronounce very well either. All in all, excepting pronounciation, the form, stucture, grammar, and cognates in the Scandianvian languages are much more similar to English than many might think. Verbs are not conjugated at all in a given tense, and the only think that might give one some difficulty is the masc/fem. vs. neuter forms of nouns. I love learning Swedish and am dabbling in Danish and Norwegian as well, and am surprised at how much I can read in both of those languages. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| koffiegast Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 5459 days ago 29 posts - 33 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 22 of 23 21 December 2009 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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If you know English and German, Dutch will be a walk in the park.
Dutch has a couple of different vowels, like a/aa distinction, ui and uu/u. In some cases words may be spelled different (comparing English/Dutch), but when it comes to pronunciation they are about the same. Also, simple sentences can be translated word for word. Complex sentences however, change completely and demand more knowledge of V2/SOV languages. And then you have the 'g'. The g/ch/sch are basically the same in the standard Dutch, sch is basically the combination of s & ch. Ch and g are basically the same as well (e.g. you don't need to worry about confusing them). The Dutch r differs from dialect to dialect. Some pronounce it like the Germans/french do, other pronounce it like a trill and others comparable to English. I personally pronounce a trill in most cases, some words with a tap/flap (like radar) and English loaned words usually a liquid. The Dutch l differs from a normal l and a velarized l (licht / melk), but you don't need to worry about the distinction as they're allophones. Edited by koffiegast on 21 December 2009 at 3:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| SteveinTX Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5453 days ago 5 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch | Message 23 of 23 27 December 2009 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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koffigast, you make a good point about the Dutch dialects and pronunciation of the "r". I remember hearing all three varieties as well....I normally rolled or as you say trilled mine. I did know other English speakers to have difficulty among the vowels with the "ui" in Dutch, mainly.
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