The Dutch Language (NOT Deutsch!)

Special thanks to Nils Van Dessel and Ashwin Sewambar for their audio recordings of Dutch words and sentences.

Michael Cuomo, Nicholas Shelokov, Sebastian Langshaw, Brandon Gonzalez, Brian Michalowski, Adrian Zhang, Vadim Sobolev, Yixin Alfred Wong, Kaan Ergen, Sky Vied, Romain Paulus, Panot, Erik Edelmann, Bennet, James Zavaleta, Ulrike Baumann, Ian Martyn, Justin Faist, Jeff Miller, Stephen Lawson, Howard Stratton, George Greene, Panthea Madjidi, Nicholas Gentry, Sergios Tsakatikas, Bruno Filippi, Sergio Tsakatikas, Qarion, Pedro Flores, and Raymond Thomas for their generous Patreon support.

Music:

Outro music: "Phase Three" by Huma Huma.

[Langfocus]

(Full disclosure: if you sign up for a premium account, Langfocus receives a small referral fee. But if I didn't like it, I wouldn't recommend it, and the free account is pretty good on its own!)

[sempaigvd]

If someone puts “dutch” in the title you know 99% of the netherlands will colonise this video

[Li.Siyuan]

I once gave a short presentation in Dutch. My host told me afterwards that my grammar was very good - I just needed another 30 years to practice the pronunciation.

[jijspeerd]

When people use Miles per hour instead of stroopwafels per fietsbel

[David-sxon]

The longest palindrome in Dutch is legermeetsysteemregel. It is a set of rules on how to measure things in the army. It's in the dictionary. You can read it backwards, it still spells the same.

[Langfocus]

This video gets a lot of comments saying that the language samples are from Google Translate. They are *not* from Google Translate. I had 2 volunteers record the sentence samples for me: one from Netherlands, and one from Belgium. Both are native speakers.

None of my videos use any language samples from Google Translate or any kind of computer-generated voice.

[lcccare]

I saw a dutch guy in Wal mart He was buying a vacuum cleaner, but said: How much is the dust sucker?

[off_Planet]

There is no need to learn dutch to any extend because everyone in the Netherlands speaks about 37 different languages fluently.

For example: On a trip through Europe I met a dutch lady at a campsite, and at first she tried talking to me in Dutch. Noticing the delay in my reaction she immediately switched to French before I could even say a word. Surprised by that I stitched together a reply in my A2-level French, which caused her to reply in English. Reliefed, I answered in English and we kept talking in English for a while. Then she asked where I was from and told her I came from Germany. She instantly switched to a perflectly fluent German with a heavy Dutch accent. These people are crazy when it comes to languages.

[johnweidner]

A Dutch friend told me:
"The French won't learn Dutch, so we must learn French."
"The Germans won't learn Dutch, so we must learn German."
"The English won't learn Dutch, so we must learn English."
"The Danes won't learn Dutch; with them we speak English or German."

[MarkusDuesseldorf]

The first Dutch phrase I've learnt was: "Heeft u een bonuskaart?"

[Phantom_madman]

as a native dutch speaker i find afrikaans more understandable than frisian LMAO

[MJ-rvri]

'Maak dat de kat wijs' doesn't mean 'make the cat wise', it means something like 'convince the cat of that' or 'make the cat believe that'.
'Wijs maken' is an expression in Dutch that does not mean 'to make wise' (to which it is translated literally), but means 'to make someone believe something (something that usually isn't true)'.

[iemenhansoul]

when the Netherlands play a sports game and they lose, Belgium laughs at them. When they win Belgium is happy and proud of them. This works the other way around too, we're kinda like brothers I guess

[geerteella]

as a native dutch speaker, I can completely understand flemish and afrikaans but I doubt any of the native dutch speaking population can understand frisian

[wingedyera]

In general I would say Dutch people don't get pissed off at you trying to learn Dutch. We are just very pragmatic and if we are trying to communicate something to a foreigner we will just use English because it's faster. If you want to practice your Dutch please tell us and we will try to restrain ourselves from answering in English (which is kind of an automatic thing ) but don't be disheartened when we will also then try to correct your grammar and pronunciation. Because you've told us you want to learn we can be quite direct in our criticism and that can come across as harsh and even quite brutal or angry. Believe us, we are not angry, we are just trying to help you.

[rikakemme]

To answer the question at the end of this video: as a native Dutch speaker I find Afrikaans easier to understand than Frisian, easier even than some regional dialects.

[neutronpixie]

Favorite Dutch word: Schildpadden. Quite literally- Shield Toads

[waterblonk]

Lemme correct a minute mistake you made. “Maak dat de kat wijs” actually translates to “Try to convince the cat of that”

[jellejacobs]

Finally someone who includes Belgium whilst talking about the dutch language

[SurfinScientist]

Another colorful (but more recent) Dutch idiom is mierenneuker, which literally means "ant fucker", i.e., someone who pays too much attention to details.