एक महीने में डच सीखिए: Learn Dutch in One Month

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Dear readers, I would like to welcome you to this Dutch Grammar Course. Dutch is spoken in Aruba, Belgium, Indonesia, Netherlands, Antilles & Suriname. It is also the third most-spoken language in Germany, after German and English, which makes sense due to shared vocabulary. Dutch sounds like a combination of German and English.

Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands. It is also called Netherlandic. The name Dutch comes from the word Dietsc, or Duutsc, as the language was called in the Middle Ages. It meant language of the people. Dutch is a Germanic language of the Indo- European language family. A really interesting characteristic of Dutch is that many words are spelled exactly the same way as they are in English.

Dutch is the mother tongue of over 23 million people. The majority of these Dutch speakers live in the Netherlands, a nation of 16.7 million. The Netherlands is also frequently referred to as Holland.

Dutch is written using the Latin alphabet. One of the clues to recognise that a piece of text is written in Dutch is the occurence of many doubled letters. This happens both to vowels and consonants. A prime example is the word voorraaddoos (supply box).

The most important dictionary of the modern Dutch language is the Van Dale groot woordenboek der Nederlandse taal, more commonly referred to as the Dikke van Dale ('dik' is Dutch for 'fat' or 'thick'). However, it is dwarfed by the 'Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal', a scholarly endeavour that took 147 years from initial idea to first edition, resulting in over 45,000 pages.

Dutch simply cannot be called a German dialect. The Dutch standard language, by definition, cannot be a dialect of another standard language, in this case standard German. The dialect group from which Dutch is largely derived, Low Franconian, belongs to the whole of continental West German dialects.

Dutch is grammatically similar to German, for example in syntax and verb morphology. Even when written Dutch looks similar to German, however the pronunciation may be markedly different. Dutch pronunciation is, however difficult to master for Anglophones, many of its diphthongs and gutturals being the greatest obstacles. Germans seem to have an advantage with the Dutch grammar, but suffer the same difficulties as the English when dealing with pronunciation.