Views : 358,495
Genre: People & Blogs
Date of upload: Nov 25, 2021 ^^
Rating : 4.913 (132/5,918 LTDR)
RYD date created : 2022-04-09T20:26:28.077079Z
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Top Comments of this video!! :3
I'm an older man from Curaçao in the Caribbean.
My mother tongue is Papiamento. I grew up hearing and speaking a lot of Dutch, Spanish and English.
In school we had to speak Dutch.
I remember how at first German was completely incomprehensible to me.
When I was 17 I went to study in Holland. There you only had 2 Dutch and 3 German channels on TV in the early 70s.
All foreign films were dubbed in German on the these German channels.
It is by watching TV that I eventually learned to understand the language and even speak broken German.
Popular music was not a completely anglophone domain when I was young.
I remember singing Papiamento, Spanish, English, French, German and Italian popular tunes in the 60s.
Udo Jürgens' "Du" was a hit song. I could sing every word of it even though I didn't understand much of what I sang.
"Je t'aime was a very popular French song by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. I could sing every word. It was a very erotic song. I could tell by the girl's moaning. But what did my 15 year old self know about eroticism.
At the time cinema wasn't all Hollywood.
There was a solid European film industry.
Even British film was distinctly different to Hollywood.
I think growing up in a multilingual popular culture facilitated my learning all these languages. Even if imperfectly so.
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When I first visited the Netherlands in 1961 without knowing the language, I thought at first I would be better understood if I spoke German rather than English. But when I spoke in German, everyone glared fiercely at me and insisted I speak English. One old man whom I asked "Do you speak English?" looked amused and replied. "Perhaps better than you." I am amazed now that the Germans have regained a good reputation in the Netherlands, coming as I do from the generation who grew up during WW2.
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I, as a German, learned dutch in school since I come from North Rhine Westfalia. Here, it is more common to learn it than in any other part of Germany I would say.
Whenever I'm in the Netherlands I try to order my food in dutch or just talk to people BUT I have to say that there are only 2 reactions when it comes to me trying to talk dutch: the dutch people either are SUPER nice or SUPER critical, there is no in between. I found that kinda sad since I'm really trying my best!
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German and Dutch have just 25% difference in the first 5000 most frequent words (they cover 85-90% of any text), which is pretty close. Dutch and English differ to the extent of 37% in this respect, German and English — to the extent of 49%.
The closest European languages, like Swedish & Danish & Norwegian, or Czech & Slovak, or Ukrainian & Belarusian, have a distance of 14-16% between their TOP-5000 frequency words.
Source image: Tyshchenko Kostiantyn, lexical distances of European languages (a diagram)
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Am a native English speaker who lives in Germany and speaks German to a high level. I found spoken Dutch really hard to understand but written was ok as it's completely different pronunciation. I got an A1 Dutch book aimed at German speakers and since using that, I find even spoken Dutch ok to follow. Once you get used to the pronunciation and rhythm it gets much easier...of course the grammar is different, but if you can speak English and German then there aren't many surprises in there that'll catch you out :) I'll likely never speak it beyond bare basic conversations with travellers as the Dutch almost always speak impeccable English, better than us natives sometimes!
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Ik moet ook toegeven dat onze Duitse taal soms heel moeilijk kan zijn. Vooral de naamvallen zijn geen pretje. Maar ik ben echt onder de indruk van hoeveel Nederlanders ten minste een beetje Duits kunnen spreken. Top! Helaas kom ik uit Baden-Württemberg. Hier in het zuiden vind je niet zoveel Nederlanders. Gelukkig is er internet en EasyDutch 😁👍
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The woman at 1:50 is doing exactly what I am trying when I‘m in the Netherlands, just the other way around. I dutchize my german and usually it works out. Usually we understand eachother anyway if we speak slowly with eachother, the dutch and german speakers :)
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@alicezanini6123
2 years ago
I love that Dutch is easier for me to understand than the German spoken in Switzerland 😂 congratulations to the team of Easy Dutch from an Italian living in Germany
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