@Metatron, sorry, but the Dutch person is not a pure native Dutch speaker. Maybe he was raised bilingual with one parent speaking Dutch and the other parent speaking Swiss-German, but not all the time, resulting in him having a Germanisk pronunciation and sentence structure.
on Dutch versus German, this one was better in my opinion: ua-cam.com/video/32VkKfZ5zSk/v-deo.html It also compares Flemish and Dutch Dutch, Austrian, German and Swiss German. As an aside on Dutch versus German. My copy of "Das Fechtbuch" by Jude Lew, has every chapter in Old German, modern German and English. The Old German is very close to Dutch
its not really that amazing, 96% of netherlands population speak english thats like 12% of any other country since theres around 25 million people on the other countrys and netherlands is not even a country just a micro country, plus dutch is a useless language just like spanish.
Dutch guy here; I highly doubt that 96% of Dutch people speak English. I have moved quite often from one province to another and I must say that here in the east there are very few people who speak English. That really shocked me, I also always thought that by far most people were rather good at English. I do have the impression that things have gotten worse in the past 30 years or so.
The Dutch guy here isn’t a native speaker, as a Dutch person I at times had difficulty understanding him and his use of verbs and his word order was at times completely off! And on the topic of English efficiency in the Netherlands, what he said is totally true, almost everyone in the Netherlands can speak atleast semi-fluent English and most can speak it fluently. English has always been a big part of (not only) the education system, but also our media.
I would agree that most Dutch people can speak English, but fluently? Absolutely not! Most Dutch people will be able to communicate in English on a basic level and with a heavy accent, but only a small percentage manages to speak English fluently.
@@mariodriessen9740 This is wrong, most dutch people speak fluent english with an accent. It depends on what you consider fluency, most speak B2 level English and I would say a good portion speak C1 or higher, which I would consider fluency. Ofcourse an accent will be there but that is with any non-native speaking person. It is not the fact that he had an accent which would be understandable, but he made multiple errors, and thus as a result he would be considered a B1 speaker, which is totally fine but also not very fair when you are comparing languages. Imagine I made a video comparing English with Dutch and then the English guy speaks broken English, I can assure you many English speakers wouldn't be pleased!
@@MonkeyDLuffy-gd6se : I understand what you mean. You’re absolutely right about the guy in this video. I don’t get why they chose him to represent the Dutch, because he clearly isn’t. But I was talking about the Dutch in general and how fluent they speak English or not. I guess we both define “fluent” in a different sense. I don’t really care about having a Dutch accent, but when I hear someone claim to speak English fluently, I expect this person to have the vocabulary of the average native English speaking people and to have the ability to express him- or herself in the same manner as he or she would when speaking Dutch. I have a lot of conversations on a daily basis in groups of people (varying from 6 to 12 participants) where all of us communicate in English for the simple fact that there are one or two who can’t speak Dutch. Most of them are highly educated. And while all of them are able to contribute to the conversation, it’s extremely rare to find examples of people who can speak another language (English in this case) as if it was their own. And that’s basically what I mean with speaking English fluently. Maybe it’s a bit like singing. Most people can sing, but only a handful are actually really good at it. 😅 Just to be clear, when I said the groups consist of 6 to 12 participants, you need to understand that these groups change everyday. In total I’m talking about 80 to 90 people (give or take). And again, most of them are highly educated (HBO of universiteit). Not all, but most. So it’s not even a good representation of the Dutch population. I’m not trying to be funny or negative. Even though I’m writing this comment right now in English, I know for a fact that most native English speakers will find my choice of words a bit odd. This little bit of writing would come across a lot better if I had written it in Dutch. And because I am writing I actually have a lot more time to think about how to construct my sentences. Now… I absolutely expect you to understand what I’m trying to get across, yet I could have saved myself a lot of time if I just wrote this bit in Dutch. And I’m using myself as an example for what I hear every day. My English is NOT fluent at all. Yet I’m certainly not the worst. It’s always the little things. Example: a look inside the toolbox of the average person will show me a couple of saws, hammers, pliers, wrenches etc. But most Dutch people wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly which saw you need. Well… of course you know what you need, but you probably have no idea how to name them, because you never had to use those words. I don’t know. Maybe this was a stupid example, but it was the first thing I thought of. I could have chosen the names of medical equipment or very specific kitchenware. We can describe what we want to say, but we can’t always say it. Again, I think I am a good example of how well (or how bad) most Dutch people speak English. But I wouldn’t even have the audacity to see myself as someone who fluently speaks English. Not even close! 😅 I hope I didn’t bore you too much with this. 😊
The dutch speaking guy did make some (small) mistakes, but a big mistake he made: he said that the dutch word for lemon is 'limoen', but that is incorrect, it is 'citroen' which is related to the german word: Zitrone. 'Limoen' is the dutch word for lime (the green citrus fruit).
He took me for a loop as well. In Afrikaans an Orange is called a "Lemoen" and a lemon is a "Suurlemoen" (Literally sour orange) and he said it was sweet so I went off on completely the wrong direction.
Fun idea to compare Dutch and German, but sadly whoever the man speaking dutch is, he sure as hell isn't a native speaker. I'd guess he was born in Switzerland because of the slight german accent he has, swiss german accent in this case. He made a lot of grammar mistakes, wrong word usage and bad sentence structures. Decent enough for a non-native speaker, i just wish they'd had a native speaker to have a proper comparison.
@@johwi33as a Dutchie I had to listen to him repeatedly to even understand him due to his pronunciation was off. And the grammar and cadence of his pronunciation was wrong for Dutch too.
"Ik drink hier heel graag van hete chocolademelk" is the same as saying, "I love to drink here from warm chocolate milk." This guy's Dutch... just isn't Dutch. Even I have a hard time understanding him sometimes and I'm a native, lol.
@@willyb7353you think we wouldn’t recognise a regional dialect in our small ass country? 😂😂 this guy just can’t speak dutch properly, which is no problem ofc, but in the case of the video he was a bad pick.
@@willyb7353 or you can just stop being overdramatic and just agree with us that it would have been better to have someone who was at least fluent. Or think okay would it be if speak like this and say i good fluent in english?
I'm Dutch, and on the matter of English proficiency here, yes the schools play a role, but also the prevalence of untranslated media. The Simpsons here is aired in English with Dutch subtitles, but when I happened upon the same show when in Germany, it was dubbed in German. And when you play videogames, you might see language settings for German, Spanish, French, etc. but none for Dutch (except educational games for very young kids). So you end up learning quite a bit of English before even having English as a school subject.
Same with Afrikaans, with 9 official languages in South Africa the usual case is you speak your mother tongue at but get either educated in Afrikaans or English. Imported media is usually left untranslated if it's in English, Anime and dramas from Japan, Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean are usually dubbed in English. Since we have a very large Indian and Pakistani populace, Bollywood media is usually in Hindi or Tamil with English subtitles. Local media are produced with more variety in local languages and once again English subtitles are provided. That means our entire country is basically bi-lingual to some degree and a lot of people speak 3, 4 or more languages.
@@PrinceAlhorian It's actually quite different. Dutch is just the one national language, English is a foreign language just like French and German which also get taught in schools. Just not as effectively because of the exposure to English.
people should stop to permanently repeat the same 'reasons' without getting aware that those are also true for many other countries with are worse at English. Netherlands is NOT the only country which get English movies not dubbed. Therefor it CANNOT be the only reason. Logic! Apart form that, there being in the EF ranking the first is good but also doesnt mean that all others have no English skills. The first 10 are quite similar with just slightly differences.
@@publicminx I didn't say it was the only reason. Just that it's a big contributing factor. I also didn't say that it's _only_ true for the Netherlands.
I am Dutch , but the woman from Germany is easier to understand than the guy talking Dutch..LoL...he talks with a german-ish accent, very unclear... Btw we don't dub movies and series, so the English spoken series and movies are english with Dutch subs. In Germany they dub everything. I really hate dubbed series and movies, cause I can't watch out of sync stuff, it makes me dizzy. Even when it's Dutch but out of sync I can't watch it or follow it..
He has a bit of a Twente/Overijssel dialect and doesn't speak with native fluency. Probably has a single parent from that region and only lived there for a few years when he was young.
@EdHunter55 yeah he has that Swiss German accent (that has the R very present). I myself are from the region Groningen/Friesland, so I know how Twents sound and that's also understandable for me. The hardest to understand is people from the south of the Netherlands, that sounds Dutch+Germen+Flamish to me.
He reminds me of my niece who grow up in Madagascar, lives in Berlin, her dad speaks French to her her mom (Belgian) Dutch. It's technically her native language but not her primary language so she does tend to make mistakes. I think this guy is in a similar situation.
Being german myself (born, raised and living near the dutch border) i have to say that the two languages are quite different, at least if you use the "High-German" language as comparison. But even if i only know a few dutch words, due to my regional dialect ("Low-German") i am able to understand most of it. And when speaking in my dialect most dutch people i met had no trouble understanding me. Fun fact: when i'm speaking in my dialect i'd guess that most dutch people would understand me but most germans would not :D
Yes, the Old High German consonant shift really changed the character of that language (or the dialects involved) and 'broke' the dialect continuum along the north-south axis. It's a pity that these northern dialects are now on the brink of extinction.
I never learned our Platt, living in the edge of the Ruhrgebiet in Schwelm. Moving to Wildeshausen, I sort of got into a listnéning comprehension, but when I moved to the north of Hamburg after a year I coulsn‘t figure out the local Platt any longer! When I met a Bratwurst guy at the local hardware shop who spoke a Platt I understood I was so happy, only it turned out he was from Harpstedt, a mere 15 km away from Wildeshausen. It‘s really hard for people who never learned to speak Platt in their families. My father was born in Kattowitz, Silesia in 1944 and was fled with his other 3 siblings at 4 months old, my mom was from Beckum, grandma from Arnsberg, Sauerland. No one I ever knew spoke any regional dialect in my family.
As a Dutch person I have difficulty understanding the Dutch spoken by the man in the blue sweater. I had to listen to him several times to understand what he meant to say. His cadence is way off and his pronunciation of consonants sounds rather forced and unnatural. His sentence structure is not correct either, and he uses words with the wrong meaning. Either he speaks in an unfamiliar dialect for me or he is not a native Dutch speaker. I suspect the latter.
While I had no trouble understanding him, I agree his accent doesn't seem purely Dutch to me. He explained he's from the Netherlands, England, and Switzerland, so that checks out. I think the video would have benefited a little bit from having someone who was only born and raised in the Netherlands.
also, big difference between lemon and lime. we don't say limoen (lime) to lemon, we say citroen, so very close to the German Zitrone. same family of fruit, very close but an important difference , especially when cooking.
The 'Dutch' guy clearly wasn't a native speaker. Some grammar and vocabulary mistakes. His accent was pretty good though, so I think it served the purpose of the video.
@@Hadewijch_ There is a Dutch ring to what he says. He must have learnt his Dutch from a native speaker, but Dutch is clearly not his native language. Maybe he has one Dutch parent?
I would say that about 90% of Dutch people under 60 year old speaks English to some degree. This doesn’t mean that all of those 90% are fluent in English or comfortable speaking English. It means they speak some English, varying from a few basic sentences all the way to holding in depth discussions.
Over 60 year old too, comfortable also has a lot to do with frequency. If you had English in school 50 years ago but hardly ever use it, it takes time to get comfortable again.
As a Afrikaans speaker, hearing Dutch is so uncanny valley. I can understand 90% of what they are saying, and can recognize the words, yet it sounds so strange to me. Languages are fascinating.
It's the pronunciation coupled with the rapid speed. I don't have time to sift through all the new grammar and decode the differences in pronunciation in a standard conversation, though if my dutch friends slow a bit down (and I myself) we can chat for days. The fun part is when we have our Flemish friend with us. Flemish is a nice middle point between Afrikaans and Dutch, she can follow along with us both at any speed and when the discussion gets animated she's usually designated "interpreter".
@@whitefang9758 A couple of months ago I was at a station near my home town here in the Netherlands where I heard two ladies conversing in this very peculiar Dutch dialect, or so I thought at first. I could only partly understand what they were saying and speculated that maybe they were from the Maastricht-Aachen region, that being a "hors système" area for me as far as my knowledge of Dutch dialects goes, but they would regularly throw in English words for everyday items, and then it finally dawned to me that they were in fact speaking Afrikaans. Such a strange experience. I love the idea that while separated by such a great physical distance, we still can connect by way of our language.
I speak Engish and French s a German, so when I watched a documentary, I think about Lupita Nyongo, and the subtitles were in Africans while she visited places in Africa, I was very surprised I got the gist of it about 80%. This person speaking Dutc was more like under 5% for me!
As a native German speaker, I never hear Dutch and confuse it with my own language. I think it is very distinct and I say that coming from a region where we have a dialect that is closer to Dutch
Im from Brazil and It was pretty close to me when I did not have much contact with German and Dutch. After moving to the Netherlands I started to recognize them, and then recognizing de Dutch from Belgium and from the Netherlands
I thought just a few hours ago that I finally hit that point where UA-cam didn't know which language to set my ads to... Then I realised my VPN was just set to Germany
In Portugal we don't dubb, we use subtitles That's why the porruguese girl said she heard more German than Dutch. We also hear Italian occasionally, comissário Montalbano, Gamorra, La Piolvora, Golpo Grosso 😀
09:50 German "Kind" and English "kid" are not cognates, surprisingly. The English Term "kid" originally meant a young goat. It somehow began to mean human children as well at some point, so it's really a slang term. Its German cognate is "Kitz", which also means a young goat, but not human children. The German word "Kind" is from a different root and has no cognates in modern English.
Duden - Das Herkunftswörterbuch Kind Mhd. kint, ahd., asächs. kind und niederl. kind gehen auf das substantivierte 2. Partizip germ. * kénþa- »gezeugt, geboren« zurück. Eng verwandt sind die nord. Wortgruppe um aisl. kind »Geschlecht, Stamm« und engl. kind »Geschlecht, Gattung, Art« sowie die ablautende Bildung aisl. kundr »Sohn; Verwandter«. Die germ. Wortgruppe gehört mit verwandten Bildungen in anderen idg. Sprachen zu der Wurzel * g̑en(ə)- »gebären, erzeugen«, vgl. z. B. aind. jātá- »geboren«, »Geschlecht, Art«, lat. natus (alat. gnatus) »geboren«, »Sohn«, »Tochter«, natio »Geburt, (Er)zeugung; Geschlecht, Stamm« (↑ Nation), natura »Geburt; angeborene Beschaffenheit, Wesen« (↑ Natur), praegnas »schwanger, trächtig« (↑ prägnant). Zu der idg. Wurzel * g̑en(ə)- »gebären, erzeugen« gehören ferner die germ. Wortgruppe von ↑ König (»Mann aus vornehmem Geschlecht«) und aus anderen idg. Sprachen, z. B. lat. gens »Geschlecht, Sippe« und genus »Geschlecht, Art, Gattung« (s. die weitverzweigte Wortgruppe um ↑ Genus). Abl.: Kindheit (mhd. kintheit, ahd. kindheit); kindisch (mhd. kindisch, ahd. kindisc »jung, kindartig, kindlich«, seit mhd. Zeit auch abwertend »albern, einfältig«); kindlich (mhd. kintlich, ahd. chindlīh). Zus.: Kindergarten (19. Jh.); Kinderhort (19. Jh.; vgl. ↑ Hort); Kinderstube (15. Jh.; zunächst im Sinne von »Schule«, seit dem Ende des 19. Jh.s dann im Sinne von »Erziehung, Manieren«); Kindeskind (mhd. kindeskint; gebildet wie Helfershelfer und Zinseszins).
@@domenicfieldhouse5644 taking Herman words like Waldsterben or Fernweh doesn‘t make them English, neither does for Kindergarten. Americans disappropriating the meaning also doeanÄt mean sh!t.
As a German her Statement of 'hey this Sounds Like German but actually it's dutch' is true, like i watch Football and When Arjen Robben talked in dutch you could clearly understand some words and you know in what direction He is going. Very similar
As a German, I don't think Dutch sounds so similar that I sometimes mistake it for German. But they are linguistically quite close. Unless you studied Dutch or you come from the North West of Germany where the dialects on both sides of the border blend into each other, spoken Dutch is quite hard to understand for native German speakers. This is because the pronunciations differ quite a lot. But written Dutch is comparatively easy to understand, even if you've never studied it. A rough comparison might be the similarity between Portuguese and Spanish, or Italian and Spanish. When I'm abroad on holiday and crave for a newspaper (which is rare) and there's no German language one available, I sometimes like to buy a Dutch newspaper and have fun the rest of the day with the guesswork. Depending on the difficulty of the text, I'd say I understand between 60 and 90 percent. North Germans have it easier than South Germans, because Northern dialects (Low German, and related dialects like Westphalian or my native Berlin dialect) have more similarities with Dutch than Southern dialects.
That is true, spoken Dutch, if it's not Flemish, is really hard to understand. It sounds like they always have an undissolvable cotton ball in their mouth when they speak. But written Dutch is indeed so much easier. I met a dutch girl on vacation once and she lent me a book of hers, I was able to follow the gist of it perfectly fine.
You should compare the Northern 'Low German' to Nedersaksisch, those 'dialects' are essentially the same language. Over here Nedersaksisch is now recognised as its own language, I could speak my language to an older farmer in Northern Germany who still speaks the language and we can likely have a regular conversation, it's pretty fascinating to me how little it has changed. Sadly all these dialects and languages are dying out fast because young people are now taught to avoid speaking it because it sounds 'uneducated' and you have to speak the universal bastardised language.
5:00 - It's not that surprising because we subtitle all foreign series and many movies here in Portugal, Metatron. I actually do the same as her, I've been following a german series on our 2nd national channel (RTP2) and after a few episodes I sometimes find myself not looking at the subtitles for some words/expressions that they use more often.
The Dutch speaker doesn't speak native Dutch. Actually it's pretty bad to the point that it sounds like he inserted English propositions translated into Dutch. Also in my life I have not heard a Dutch person refer to the handle of a cup as hendel. Which technically is correct, but not vocabulary. That would ear (oor of oortje).
9:47 No, actually! The word “kid” entered English via the Old Norse “kið” from Proto-Germanic “*kidją” further from either “*gʰaydn-” or “*ǵʰaydn-“ (goat) or “*gidʰ-“ (goatling) in Proto-Indo-European. The German word it’s related to is “Kitz(e)” (“baby goat” among other animals). German “Kind” is from the Proto-Germanic “*kindą” or “*kinþą“ from Proto-Indo-European “*ǵenh₁-“ which meant “to give birth.” The English word directly related to this one is “kin.”
As a native Dutch speaker myself, I can hear this guy is not a native Dutch-speaker but has learnt Dutch. The pronunciation is not so smooth, nor is it fast
7:53 that makes sense based on the what i’ve learned from singing songs in Italian from LazyTown. (This is my odd way of learning language’s pronunciation as of late) There’s a line “what goes up must come down” in one of the songs.
German girl threw me for a loop when she described hands lol. I am a native german speaker, so linguistically there was no issue. But when she described hands, she said "man hat 10 Stück davon" = "you have 10 of them" which made me think of fingers. So, similarily with the guy who confused sour and sweet, she made a mistake talking about fingers when she should've stuck to hands. If the other guests had understood more German they would likely have been thrown off too.
Yes the guy isn't native, he responded to comments the original video stop bashing him. I think it is kind of cool he was taught Dutch by his parents despite not growing up in the Netherlands and it is quite special if someone is willing to learn Dutch. And yes the Netherlands has the highest English index for English speakers in countries where English is not the native language. Which is just as high as in Malta which has English as one of the official languages. Also, c'mon man you Italians have sweet lemons that you can eat with peel ;)
As a german i have a hard time understanding spoken dutch, written dutch is easier. However im from the south and its easier for those in the rural north as their dialects are much close to dutch. Its the same with the swiss but the other way round. Understanding them is not that hard, but for those from the north it is extremely hard. As for the word guessing. The way they are describing the word makes it hard to guess for me even if i understand the language. So with the german girl describing child you really had to get the first 3 words, otherwise you were completely lost.
plattdeutsch dialect you mean? it's very similar, we tend to get tourists here from hamburg area, we just speak our own language and can understand eachother.
@@lebell79 No... with all strong the "plat" dialects i can guess a bit and i imagine to understand more than with dutch, but if i had to speak to them i would be completely lost.
As native Dutch is very easy to distinguish (high) German from (standard) Dutch. But even for me it's sometimes hard to understand some of the Dutch dialects, especially the eastern ones (I'm from the west). I can understand and read German pretty easily, but if they go on fully dialect, it's all gibberish to me as well. I also recognize Swiss and Austrian German, but I have to listen carefully to understand it (the latter is easier for me). It's like Portugese, if you're native you will immediately know if someone is from Portugal or from Brazil. By now, after listening to a lot of language content, I can hear the difference as well, but it still takes some time.
No one can understand the Swiss once they switch into their Cantonese dialects, trust me! I was in Zurich, visiting my Equadorian friend who was staying with family, learning German…we sat in a bus when a woman tried getting on with a large German Shephard Dog. She and the bus driver got into quite a heated discussion, and my Equadorian friend looked at me for a translation, only to see me shaking my head in frustration, because I hand‘t caught one word! It was such an uniquely emberassing situation! 😅
If you study Dutch and German a little more, you will notice that the individual words are often very similar, just written and pronounced slightly differently. The grammar is also quite similar, although Dutch is a little more "cleared out". German carries a lot of old stuff with it. Dutch and Low German are even more similar in pronunciation, because neither has undergone the second sound shift.
I think the fact that the German speaker was a woman made them also say it was easier to understand. And yeah, German is a bit more widespread than Dutch, especially here in Europe. However, like you said, many people just know German from WW2 movies etc. which isn't a nice representation and hence the stereotype of German always sounding angry. But you can hear that that's obviously not the case when you listen to her.
I can understand quite a bit of written German, but not much of it when it's spoken, from my experience it's the same among my fellow Dutchies. I like the sound of German, I see people often calling it harsh sounding, but i never really had that impression.
as a german I also can understand most written Dutch, but spoken Dutch is pretty hard. if a Dutch speaker speaks very slowly, usually it's possible understand most of it, at least if you vaguely know the context.
As a Dutch... Lets see.. Lets gooooo! 1:50 English is a basic class in school. 6:44 his way of describing the cup is so strange . Clearly not a full native Dutch speaker. But, he does the best he can. 11:09 we are nice... 😂 12:26 when the lemon is baked on top of the fish, it loses some of the sourness, but then again, he is not fully a native Dutch speaker. 😅 13:25 we call a lemon, also Citroen, a limoen is the greenish kind. Again, not a true native Dutch speaker. This is fun, but a shame they got a person who learned Dutch later, not as a Child. He made the gap between German and Dutch seem bigger.
I'm Dutch, seems correct. The guy is clearly not an Amsterdammer though. I wonder, maybe someone at the border of Germany? Okay, that dude is not actually Dutch. That becomes clear halfway through. When on vacation, we always play 'guess the Dutch' when we're at dinner and 9/10 times, they turn out to be German. If you want to watch something in German, watch 'Dark'.
That an Italian is so puzzled by the fact that the over 90% of Dutch people can speak English, cracked me up. Italy is notorious for their combination of few English speakers and their refusal to engage in foreign languages even if they can speak them. Italy is on place 32 in the ranking of English speakers in Europe. Only Turkey, Aserbeidschan and France are worse according to the epi (English proficiency index)
Dutch here; I don't know if the number is correct, but the only person i knew that couldn't speak at least a little bit of English has died of old age. Her husband has enough dementia to have lost his ability to understand foreign languages, so he might be in the 4%.
To my Italian ears, I find something interesting happening. I find that I prefer the sound of nederlands to deutsch when they are speaking their languages because nederlands has a more fluid flow to the language and deutsch has more of a choppy flow. However, when they are speaking English, I prefer the sound of German accents for some reason because they sound more exotic to me than Dutch which sounds more similar to a neutral English accent.
I live in south-west Germany, at the french-swiss border. I have already problems understanding the northern german dialects, they sound like they speak with a potatoe in their mouth. Dutch is even harder (like a drunk northern german with a boiling hot potatoe in their mouth). Written dutch is a bit easier, but it's more like kiiiinda understanding every 3rd or 4th word, and it's like you can nearly grasp the meaning, but not really, gives me a headache. On the other hand, people from the north-west, living closer to the dutch border, can totally understand dutch (if they speak a bit slower), cause their dialect is very influenced.
There are 'false friends' between German and Dutch, such as 'klaarkomen' which means 'to get by' in German, and 'to ejaculate' in Dutch. Though German and Dutch are similar, there is considerable difference between them. I'm particularly aware of this, as I speak Dutch to communication level, and I'm currently attempting to learn some German, by comparing Dutch and German vocabulary, which is proving to be an interesting experience.
When I hear Dutch I never think, "Wait, is this German?". I immediately know that it's not German and I also don't realize that it's Dutch right away. To me Dutch sound like funny gibberish with a few German words thrown in now and then. That may depend on which region of Germany you're from.
React to the interview with the Brazilian man who studied over 150 languages in his 89 years on this planet. He lived and taught in Bolivia, Italy, Serbia and went to many other countries. He had a degree in Germanic languages and a degree in Romance languages, which he did at the same time. He studied on average 2 new languages per year and claimed a conversational level I about 30. He studied Mandarin, Japanese, about every Slavic language, Yoruba (which he found too hard), etc.. And , the best of all, he wrote a book with 60 poems in 60 languages, which he translated to Portuguese. The book has both the original poems and his translation. The title of the book is Babel de poemas. The man name's is Carlos Amaral Freire. In the interview he talks about Mandarin and how impossible it is to properly translate Mandarin to other languages and he reads a poem in Mandarin. If you are interested in reacting to the interview I could find the highlights you'd probably be more interested in reacting to. The interview is in Portuguese, but it has UA-cam auto dubbing.
It is not true that 96% of the people in the Netherlands speak English. In any case not the working class. In the place where I work they is no one who can speak good English. Only "good morning" and "How do you do". But maybe it is different with higher educated people.
Most of the working class people i know do speak english pretty good, might depend a bit on the region they are from. Maybe in the bible belt its not as common. Its definitely not only the higher educated people who speak good english. The basic is the same for all of us. Only the younger kids series or movies are dubbed in dutch. The rest is always subtitled in dutch this also applies for german or french.
@@thijs166 the variation of English proficiency is because of educational level rather than a regional or gender issue. There is little to no difference in English proficiency between provinces, or urban vs. rural population, or men vs women.
@@thijs166 This has nothing to do with the Bible. The working class has a very limited knowledge of English. They are not able to have a conversation. This is my experience. Watching movies, people just read the subtitles. They don't pay attention to what is spoken.
For me as a German Dutch sounds quite like a German dialect (no offense meant ^^). I grew up with a grandmother who spoke Plattdeutsch (Lower German) which is quite similar to Dutch. And as a teenager I had a Dutch boyfriend and one day I noticed that I could understand nearly everything his family members said in Dutch although I wasn't even trying. You just have to flip the switch in your head as if you were listening to someone speaking a dialect.
The reason is that there is (or at least was) a Dialect continuum that include all German and Dutch varieties. The border of Germany and the Netherlands has nothing to do with differences in languages or dialects. It is based on political developments over the centuries.
As a Native German speaker, it is easier for me to understand written Dutch then spoken Dutch. In general Dutch seems to me like Low German spoken in North-West Germany with a thick thick thick Accent. For example when the Dutch Speaker said the word for Juice is "Sap" it reminded me of the german "Saft". So similarities are there but for non germanic Speakers they are not so obvious to hear.
Dutch is much easier. I even understood it as a baby 🙂 Kudos to the Guy speaking 3 languages, but he has quite an accent and definitely sounds different from a native speaker ( The Netherlands of Belgium) one of the reasons so many native Dutch speakers are proficient in English is the fact that TV and films are always subtitled. So we are exposed quite early and often exposed to English, with the translation provided.
I suspect the Dutch guy grew up in a foreign country with a Dutch parent. The accent is alright but the intonation is off, the syntax mistakes give away that he's not completely fluent in the language. I'm pretty sure a Dutch native speaker good have played with the vocabulary and intonation a bit to make it easier for them to understand like what the German girl was doing
I think I can answer your question about Dutch people speaking English, I'm not sure what the percentage is but I would assume it to be higher than at least 80% for every age group of the native Dutch population. For example, my grandmother comes from a lower class family and is nearly 83 years old, she dropped out of high school at age 14, but she can easily manage a conversation in English. Not without mistakes or about convoluted topics, but normal conversations she can manage fine. The reason why so many Dutch people speak English puzzles me somewhat. One explanation is that Dutch is closely related to English, but I feel like German also is pretty closely related to English and the Germans are much worse at speaking English on average. Maybe it's because we don't like dubbed movies or television programmes, so we hear English more often on the TV than in Germany. Or maybe it's because the Dutch are simply more involved in international trade. Or maybe the Dutch like traveling abroad because our country is very small. We also had English and French speaking reformed churches in Amsterdam since the 17th century, so maybe the Dutch simply like other languages.
I think the word you were looking for is "compound words". It's actually quite easy to learn the longer words when you learn the meanings of the compound words themselves (Which are very much shorter and easily digestible) and then add them together. I'm German myself and work with a lot of Dutch and have to say that it's very distinct. If you've ever heard a handful of Dutch speak of course you could get confused for a second, but when you hear it daily you can easily hear when it's not German that's being spoken. Even with years of experience hearing Dutch I still can barely understand a word, even if I speak English and German. Only thing that helps is my grandparents used to speak only in Kleverländisch (Platt) to each other and me and that helps me out somewhat sometimes. Reading on the other hand is very easy when I take my time and mix the knowledge of German, English and Platt together 😀
He has a very strange Dutch accent, it definitely does not sound native at all. The cadence and pronunciation feels like someone speaking Afrikaans to me
As a German I found the girl easier to understand. Germans who are still able to speak low German as in "Plattdeutsch" might have an easier time to understand Dutch. Otherwise it's distinctive enough.
I'm an Italian born and raised in the Netherlands and yes everyone speaks English. You don't even need to know Dutch to live/work here. I went to an international school, so I can't speak from experience, but Dutch kids are taught it extensively in school. Edit: yeah his Dutch is weird. My dutch isnt perfect and i havent lived there in 8 years but his Dutch isn't perfect either
The guy speaking Dutch has some aspects in his accent that sounds to me, a native Dutch speaker (speaking English myself also, and can understand, but not speak, German almost as well as English), that his first language is probably English due to his vowels and the pronunciation of his 'r. Not quite sure if this makes it easier to understand by someone not speaking Dutch or harder. Also, he's using some incorrect words ('limoen' is not a 'lemon' in Dutch, it's "citroen")
the way he pronounces 'kind' sounds like his Swiss German accent is coming through. The Dutch 'k' has a subtle distinct quality from the German 'k' (just try to find the way, for example, the Dutch say 'koffie' compared to the German 'Kaffee') .. the German 'k' is much closer to the English 'c' in 'coffee', distinctly more aspirated.
Northern dialects of German/Frisian, for me, are almost indistinguishable from Dutch. I spent a few hours studying Dutch years ago, and I can still understand 60-80% of normal conversations.
I am Afrikaans, which is derived from Dutch. I can understand a lot Dutch and German, especially when I read it. Maybe look into the the connection between Dutch and Afrikaans? That would be amazing. Ps. I understood the the Dutch guy better than the German girl...
Nederlands is de moedertaal van Afrikaans. Het klinkt voor ons een beetje als kinderlijk Nederlands omdat het vaak versimpeld is. Ik denk dat jij kan begrijpen wat hier staat. Ons vir jou 🇳🇱 ❤ 🇿🇦
I'd definitely agree with the assessment, that Dutch sounds like broken German sometimes. It sits in that spot where you think you just have to understand it, but can't quite manage. It's even more present when reading it, compared to listening.
As the other person above said, you can say "Ich mag Zitronen". You could also say "Ich habe Zitronen gern", though as I'm not a native German speaker, I don't know which is more common. Then again, you might not use "gern haben" in that context.
The problem with German is that, from all languages, it's the most similar to Dutch but still different. That makes learning German sometimes tricky as you think the exact same word might mean the same in both languages and it doesn't. They are both germanic languages.
German here. I think both choose pretty awkward descriptions that made it hard to grasp the dedicated subject. Though I know some Nederlands phrases the duch guy was particularly hard to understand for me. Germans actually don't bother to learn Nederlands because we believe most Dutch people understand and speak decent German anyways. Which is a shame IMO. And well if German doesn't work switching to English indeed seems to be a widely applicable option. Also you'll often hear people make pun of Nederlands saying it sounds like German spoken with a hot potatoe in your mouth. Though that is pretty rude I can kinda relate to it because German already is a pretty throathy language with its gutteral ch- and r-sounds but the Nederlands g or gr just seems to excel at that.
Dutch doesnt have the high german consonant shift which the norse languages also dont have. But low german is even closer than both high german and dutch. It was spoken at the border of denmark and germany so they influenced each other a bit.
Dutch guy is possibly hasn't lived in the Netherlands for a while. Dutch people who go on to be expats in other countries relatively quickly forget correct Dutch pronunciations. Some famous media people who went to the U.S. for a couple of years sound more like they speak Afrikaans when they come back. But maybe he's only second generation Dutch, meaning his parents are Dutch but he hasn't really lived in the Netherlands?
8:57 funny that she says "hart", we'd normally say "schwer" oder "schwierig", but if you speak tons of English, you'd mix the words up and say "hart" 😂
2:20 I have that more with Danish because to a High German speaker who speaks the standard dialect, it sounds like phonetically identical gibberish, which is really odd. Dutch, to me, is more like German with well different phonetics. It's very distinct though, so I'd never confuse it for German. However, I can understand some of it, unlike with Danish. Funnily enough, I understood more Norwegian than I would Danish when I was in Norway for a competition once (I didn't quite understand everything but I always knew what people were talking about, more or less).
3:15 - in most places outside of Italy, barista's will put chocolate powder on a cappuccino whether you ask or not. Just like the Pizza that most of the world knows is American-style pizza etc. Italia created it, but a different version became the most popular worldwide. She could have said Mocha though, would have been more accurate...
I would argue against the idea that "the pizza most of the world knows is american style Pizza." Especially here in europe that's not the case. The biggest difference to italians are the toppings, as a real Pizza according to italians is a Margherita and has no other toppings. But the dough and stuff are the italian way usually here in europe.
@@nirfz In all of Asia, Africa, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia & South and Central America American pizza is way more well known. This accounts for the vast majority of the population of the world... I personally think Italian (real) pizza is superior in every way, but facts are facts.
1:25 if I remember correctly The Netherlands is the non-native English speaking country with the most English proficiency, however if for Belgium it was split by region, Flanders would take the cake.
The English in the Netherlands is better, although the difference is not as big as with German, but our French is terrible. The laugh with our French, which is fair, unfortunately.
Native Dutch speaker here. Overall I find that English proficiency in the Netherlands is a little overrated. I definitely don't believe the 96% figure (maybe if we define speaking English as being okay with very basic interactions like directions, shopping and stuff). I live in a fairly big city and the number of people in their 20s and 30s who still struggle with natural and conversational English is honestly a little embarrassing given how people in this country self-assess themselves as being very proficient.
In brazilian portuguese "Lemon" its "Limão Siciliano" and "lime" its "Limão-taiti". If you say "limão" people will give you a "Limão-taiti" (at least in my region).
German here. Germany is not very homogeneous in terms of dialects. People from north west Germany will understand Dutch better than Saxons or Bavarians, for example, simply because it’s more similar to how they speak German. It’s true that the Dutch are more proficient in English than, for example, Germans, because they don’t dub movies and get much exposure to English cultural products. Yet, it’s the fact that there are 90 million native speakers of German in Europe that makes dubbing movies and television and translating books into German much more economically viable. English has the largest market for such products and will create larger quantities of different titles. On the other hand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland translate more content from different languages into German, than the English speaking world translates non-English content into English, in percentage of the overall number of films, programs or books available. Conversely, it is also less economical to translate from languages like French, Italian, Spanish or Czech or Greek into Dutch, than into German. So the proficiency in English is a kind of mixed blessing. English is the world’s first foreign language and will give you access to a great many sources and opportunities. But it also creates a strong bias towards sources that are in English, because non-English content has to overcome the barrier towards an already crowded market, to make it into English. As a result, mediocre English stuff can easily get a greater audience than the finest content from smaller languages. When translating and dubbing are an accepted investment in the eyes of the distributor, there is a more level playing field. Thankfully, many Dutch people will speak two or three or even more foreign languages. Many speak German, and also French or Spanish. In my eyes, that’s even better than relying entirely on translations to understand what’s going on elsewhere in the world.
I live and work in the Netherlands near the German border. At school we learn at least 3 languages, Dutch (of course), English and German. Despite this, English is the second language for the vast majority of Dutch people under the age of 60. Also here in the border area. The people speak English almost as well as Dutch and switch effortlessly to English when the situation requires it. The reason for this is that we watch all English spoken films in English with Dutch subtitles. It's like having English lessons every day while watching TV. In the past, most Dutch people spoke better German than English. That also has to do with TV. In the 70s, 80s and part of the 90s there were at most 3 Dutch channels in the Netherlands, a Belgian channel, the BBC and a few German channels. So a lot of German TV was watched and now it is the case that Germans do not use subtitles, but dubbing. The first time I saw The Terminator it was on the German channel (yes, I'm getting old). According to this German channel, the film was called Der Terminator and Arnie did not say ill be back but Ich komme wieder. Now I regularly have Germans as customers. The generation under 40 often tries frantically and imperfectly in English because they know that the chance that they will be helped properly is greater. I always see a sigh of relief when I answer them in German and tell them that they can speak German to me. Also, the guy speaking Dutch, isnt Dutch.
from my experience you cant understand dutch as a german. a few words are similar or the same, but at normal conversation speed you have no chance of getting whats being said.
This was interesting but they should have picked a native Dutch speaker. I'm Dutch and I had trouble following him at time. There was also the mistake that he mixed up two fruits. A limoen is a lime. It should have been citroen. I find much Dutch people will be able to understand German. I was never had a lesson in German and I understand about 90% of what's spoken or writen. I also watched a lot of German shows on tv. Nothing gets subbed here, unless it's a child show, so I watched a lot of crime shows in German. So I just picked up things as a child. Indeed a lot of Dutch people how are under 50/60ths can speak pretty good English. Usually through a mix of the school system and things you just hear around you in your suroundings.
I disagree here.... most Dutch would always say they understand German for 90% and can speak it. As a German actually speaking both languages I can tell you....its not true. You understand about 30%. I do ageee with you on the Dutch guy. He has a heavy German accent
The English language has adapted many German words. By the way; the Dutch language is actually a variation of Frisian - as the Frisians in northern Germany still speak it in a more modern version. The word "Dutch" is actually a mistake in the English language, because it actually means Deutsch (German).
For me as German, I could not understand the Dutch guy despite the Dutch are using often similar words. The reason for is the accent because I don't have these problems when I look on a written dutch text for example in e-mails I get at work. The dutch language sounds for me like a mix of German and Englisch spoken by someone that is chewing on something while speaking. There are sometimes individual words I notice but mostly it could also be some Aliens langauge. And the German Woman was very bad in explanation of things. I was not even sure if she really meant the Hand or if she meant the 10 Finger instead.
Link to the original video
ua-cam.com/video/AgoEN_CGB2E/v-deo.html
@Metatron, sorry, but the Dutch person is not a pure native Dutch speaker. Maybe he was raised bilingual with one parent speaking Dutch and the other parent speaking Swiss-German, but not all the time, resulting in him having a Germanisk pronunciation and sentence structure.
on Dutch versus German, this one was better in my opinion: ua-cam.com/video/32VkKfZ5zSk/v-deo.html
It also compares Flemish and Dutch Dutch, Austrian, German and Swiss German.
As an aside on Dutch versus German. My copy of "Das Fechtbuch" by Jude Lew, has every chapter in Old German, modern German and English. The Old German is very close to Dutch
its not really that amazing, 96% of netherlands population speak english thats like 12% of any other country since theres around 25 million people on the other countrys and netherlands is not even a country just a micro country, plus dutch is a useless language just like spanish.
Kimberly (the Brazilian girl) actually speaks German 😅
Dutch guy here; I highly doubt that 96% of Dutch people speak English.
I have moved quite often from one province to another and I must say that here in the east there are very few people who speak English. That really shocked me, I also always thought that by far most people were rather good at English. I do have the impression that things have gotten worse in the past 30 years or so.
This Dutch guy doesn't speak Dutch the way a native does. His accent is weird and he uses wrong words.
Correct
Agree
Indeed
Yeah I'm Dutch and I had trouble understanding him sometimes. Bad choice for a participant
As a dutch person, you're right
The Dutch guy here isn’t a native speaker, as a Dutch person I at times had difficulty understanding him and his use of verbs and his word order was at times completely off! And on the topic of English efficiency in the Netherlands, what he said is totally true, almost everyone in the Netherlands can speak atleast semi-fluent English and most can speak it fluently. English has always been a big part of (not only) the education system, but also our media.
I would agree that most Dutch people can speak English, but fluently? Absolutely not! Most Dutch people will be able to communicate in English on a basic level and with a heavy accent, but only a small percentage manages to speak English fluently.
"Heel veel mensen eet dit (graag) met de vis." Ja ze konden niet eens een Nederlander die Nederlands daadwerkelijk spreekt gebruiken xD
@@mariodriessen9740 This is wrong, most dutch people speak fluent english with an accent. It depends on what you consider fluency, most speak B2 level English and I would say a good portion speak C1 or higher, which I would consider fluency. Ofcourse an accent will be there but that is with any non-native speaking person. It is not the fact that he had an accent which would be understandable, but he made multiple errors, and thus as a result he would be considered a B1 speaker, which is totally fine but also not very fair when you are comparing languages. Imagine I made a video comparing English with Dutch and then the English guy speaks broken English, I can assure you many English speakers wouldn't be pleased!
@@MonkeyDLuffy-gd6se : I understand what you mean. You’re absolutely right about the guy in this video. I don’t get why they chose him to represent the Dutch, because he clearly isn’t.
But I was talking about the Dutch in general and how fluent they speak English or not. I guess we both define “fluent” in a different sense.
I don’t really care about having a Dutch accent, but when I hear someone claim to speak English fluently, I expect this person to have the vocabulary of the average native English speaking people and to have the ability to express him- or herself in the same manner as he or she would when speaking Dutch.
I have a lot of conversations on a daily basis in groups of people (varying from 6 to 12 participants) where all of us communicate in English for the simple fact that there are one or two who can’t speak Dutch. Most of them are highly educated. And while all of them are able to contribute to the conversation, it’s extremely rare to find examples of people who can speak another language (English in this case) as if it was their own. And that’s basically what I mean with speaking English fluently.
Maybe it’s a bit like singing. Most people can sing, but only a handful are actually really good at it. 😅
Just to be clear, when I said the groups consist of 6 to 12 participants, you need to understand that these groups change everyday. In total I’m talking about 80 to 90 people (give or take). And again, most of them are highly educated (HBO of universiteit). Not all, but most. So it’s not even a good representation of the Dutch population.
I’m not trying to be funny or negative. Even though I’m writing this comment right now in English, I know for a fact that most native English speakers will find my choice of words a bit odd. This little bit of writing would come across a lot better if I had written it in Dutch. And because I am writing I actually have a lot more time to think about how to construct my sentences.
Now… I absolutely expect you to understand what I’m trying to get across, yet I could have saved myself a lot of time if I just wrote this bit in Dutch. And I’m using myself as an example for what I hear every day. My English is NOT fluent at all. Yet I’m certainly not the worst.
It’s always the little things. Example: a look inside the toolbox of the average person will show me a couple of saws, hammers, pliers, wrenches etc. But most Dutch people wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly which saw you need. Well… of course you know what you need, but you probably have no idea how to name them, because you never had to use those words.
I don’t know. Maybe this was a stupid example, but it was the first thing I thought of. I could have chosen the names of medical equipment or very specific kitchenware. We can describe what we want to say, but we can’t always say it.
Again, I think I am a good example of how well (or how bad) most Dutch people speak English. But I wouldn’t even have the audacity to see myself as someone who fluently speaks English. Not even close! 😅
I hope I didn’t bore you too much with this. 😊
yes, im dutch and if someone speaks to me like that i would switch to english.
The dutch speaking guy did make some (small) mistakes, but a big mistake he made: he said that the dutch word for lemon is 'limoen', but that is incorrect, it is 'citroen' which is related to the german word: Zitrone. 'Limoen' is the dutch word for lime (the green citrus fruit).
Not really a language mistake, more of a knowledge one, a little like Oranges and Clemenines.
He took me for a loop as well. In Afrikaans an Orange is called a "Lemoen" and a lemon is a "Suurlemoen" (Literally sour orange) and he said it was sweet so I went off on completely the wrong direction.
heeft hij misschien 'zoet' verward met 'zuur'?
Limes are also yellow if they are ripe. They are just usually sold unripe.
Yeah, he was fairly bad at dutch. I doubt he is a native speaker, or at least I don't think dutch is his primary language
Fun idea to compare Dutch and German, but sadly whoever the man speaking dutch is, he sure as hell isn't a native speaker.
I'd guess he was born in Switzerland because of the slight german accent he has, swiss german accent in this case.
He made a lot of grammar mistakes, wrong word usage and bad sentence structures.
Decent enough for a non-native speaker, i just wish they'd had a native speaker to have a proper comparison.
Exactly this,he isn't pronouncing certain letters end words correctly..
@@johwi33as a Dutchie I had to listen to him repeatedly to even understand him due to his pronunciation was off. And the grammar and cadence of his pronunciation was wrong for Dutch too.
"Ik drink hier heel graag van hete chocolademelk" is the same as saying, "I love to drink here from warm chocolate milk."
This guy's Dutch... just isn't Dutch. Even I have a hard time understanding him sometimes and I'm a native, lol.
His pronunciation is off. I think he's more Swiss than Dutch
😂 ahh.. perhaps regional dialect???
@@willyb7353you think we wouldn’t recognise a regional dialect in our small ass country? 😂😂 this guy just can’t speak dutch properly, which is no problem ofc, but in the case of the video he was a bad pick.
@@Monyato
Agreed, they should've brought in a proper Dutch linguist, so they could really get some good learning from the experience.
@@willyb7353 or you can just stop being overdramatic and just agree with us that it would have been better to have someone who was at least fluent. Or think okay would it be if speak like this and say i good fluent in english?
I'm Dutch, and on the matter of English proficiency here, yes the schools play a role, but also the prevalence of untranslated media. The Simpsons here is aired in English with Dutch subtitles, but when I happened upon the same show when in Germany, it was dubbed in German. And when you play videogames, you might see language settings for German, Spanish, French, etc. but none for Dutch (except educational games for very young kids). So you end up learning quite a bit of English before even having English as a school subject.
Same with Afrikaans, with 9 official languages in South Africa the usual case is you speak your mother tongue at but get either educated in Afrikaans or English. Imported media is usually left untranslated if it's in English, Anime and dramas from Japan, Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean are usually dubbed in English. Since we have a very large Indian and Pakistani populace, Bollywood media is usually in Hindi or Tamil with English subtitles. Local media are produced with more variety in local languages and once again English subtitles are provided. That means our entire country is basically bi-lingual to some degree and a lot of people speak 3, 4 or more languages.
@@PrinceAlhorian It's actually quite different. Dutch is just the one national language, English is a foreign language just like French and German which also get taught in schools. Just not as effectively because of the exposure to English.
people should stop to permanently repeat the same 'reasons' without getting aware that those are also true for many other countries with are worse at English. Netherlands is NOT the only country which get English movies not dubbed. Therefor it CANNOT be the only reason. Logic! Apart form that, there being in the EF ranking the first is good but also doesnt mean that all others have no English skills. The first 10 are quite similar with just slightly differences.
@@publicminx I didn't say it was the only reason. Just that it's a big contributing factor. I also didn't say that it's _only_ true for the Netherlands.
@@publicminx The other countries who do that are only marginally worse at English. Then there is a gap to countries which don't do that.
I am Dutch , but the woman from Germany is easier to understand than the guy talking Dutch..LoL...he talks with a german-ish accent, very unclear...
Btw we don't dub movies and series, so the English spoken series and movies are english with Dutch subs. In Germany they dub everything. I really hate dubbed series and movies, cause I can't watch out of sync stuff, it makes me dizzy. Even when it's Dutch but out of sync I can't watch it or follow it..
He has a bit of a Twente/Overijssel dialect and doesn't speak with native fluency. Probably has a single parent from that region and only lived there for a few years when he was young.
@@itsmederek1 Pretty sure he's Swiss.. :S
@EdHunter55 yeah he has that Swiss German accent (that has the R very present).
I myself are from the region Groningen/Friesland, so I know how Twents sound and that's also understandable for me. The hardest to understand is people from the south of the Netherlands, that sounds Dutch+Germen+Flamish to me.
@@EdHunter55 He is, its on his nametag lol. Just as he's also Dutch and English...
@@OneTheAndOnlyOne what do you mean the "R very present"? We roll the R's in the Netherlands too
The Dutch speaker is not a native Dutch speaker. His Dutch sounds weird.
He reminds me of my niece who grow up in Madagascar, lives in Berlin, her dad speaks French to her her mom (Belgian) Dutch. It's technically her native language but not her primary language so she does tend to make mistakes. I think this guy is in a similar situation.
Being german myself (born, raised and living near the dutch border) i have to say that the two languages are quite different, at least if you use the "High-German" language as comparison. But even if i only know a few dutch words, due to my regional dialect ("Low-German") i am able to understand most of it. And when speaking in my dialect most dutch people i met had no trouble understanding me. Fun fact: when i'm speaking in my dialect i'd guess that most dutch people would understand me but most germans would not :D
Agree. I would have started to describe a child as "Ein junger Mensch". That should be comprehensible even for an English speaker.
Yes, the Old High German consonant shift really changed the character of that language (or the dialects involved) and 'broke' the dialect continuum along the north-south axis. It's a pity that these northern dialects are now on the brink of extinction.
I can understand German dialects all the way up to Berlin better than High German
I never learned our Platt, living in the edge of the Ruhrgebiet in Schwelm.
Moving to Wildeshausen, I sort of got into a listnéning comprehension, but when I moved to the north of Hamburg after a year I coulsn‘t figure out the local Platt any longer!
When I met a Bratwurst guy at the local hardware shop who spoke a Platt I understood I was so happy, only it turned out he was from Harpstedt, a mere 15 km away from Wildeshausen.
It‘s really hard for people who never learned to speak Platt in their families. My father was born in Kattowitz, Silesia in 1944 and was fled with his other 3 siblings at 4 months old, my mom was from Beckum, grandma from Arnsberg, Sauerland.
No one I ever knew spoke any regional dialect in my family.
100% agree.
I wonder how "your" Low German spoken near the Dutch border sounds compared to Low German spoken near the Danish border.
As a Dutch person I have difficulty understanding the Dutch spoken by the man in the blue sweater. I had to listen to him several times to understand what he meant to say.
His cadence is way off and his pronunciation of consonants sounds rather forced and unnatural. His sentence structure is not correct either, and he uses words with the wrong meaning.
Either he speaks in an unfamiliar dialect for me or he is not a native Dutch speaker. I suspect the latter.
While I had no trouble understanding him, I agree his accent doesn't seem purely Dutch to me. He explained he's from the Netherlands, England, and Switzerland, so that checks out. I think the video would have benefited a little bit from having someone who was only born and raised in the Netherlands.
waar, wat jammer dat ze niet gewoon een nederlander hadden voor deze filmpje
You’ve never watched any German films, Metatron? I recommend Run Lola Run. It’s an excellent film in the German language.
@@Taipan108 also Das Leben der Anderen.
also, big difference between lemon and lime. we don't say limoen (lime) to lemon, we say citroen, so very close to the German Zitrone. same family of fruit, very close but an important difference , especially when cooking.
The 'Dutch' guy clearly wasn't a native speaker.
Some grammar and vocabulary mistakes.
His accent was pretty good though, so I think it served the purpose of the video.
@@klaasfeys847 I thought his accent made his Dutch almost incomprehensible. But I might be from a different region than you are.
@@Hadewijch_ There is a Dutch ring to what he says. He must have learnt his Dutch from a native speaker, but Dutch is clearly not his native language. Maybe he has one Dutch parent?
His Dutch isn’t native… which is the point of him being there
Im dutch and the dude had a heavy german accent witch made it sound rally german
Pretty sure the guy is Swiss.
@@EdHunter55 the swiss flag among the dutch and british would suggest that he also speaks swiss german.
Trust me, as a German, he really isn‘t helping us with comprehending anything!
@@lynnm6413 lol, yes. Its not convient for anyone.
The dude speaking Dutch has a big accent... we would assume he is NOT dutch. But has been learning it for a long time.
I would say that about 90% of Dutch people under 60 year old speaks English to some degree. This doesn’t mean that all of those 90% are fluent in English or comfortable speaking English. It means they speak some English, varying from a few basic sentences all the way to holding in depth discussions.
Over 60 year old too, comfortable also has a lot to do with frequency. If you had English in school 50 years ago but hardly ever use it, it takes time to get comfortable again.
More often than not it is fluency, especially with Gen Z or Gen X
"Ich mag Zitronen" - I like lemons
As a Afrikaans speaker, hearing Dutch is so uncanny valley. I can understand 90% of what they are saying, and can recognize the words, yet it sounds so strange to me. Languages are fascinating.
It's the pronunciation coupled with the rapid speed. I don't have time to sift through all the new grammar and decode the differences in pronunciation in a standard conversation, though if my dutch friends slow a bit down (and I myself) we can chat for days. The fun part is when we have our Flemish friend with us. Flemish is a nice middle point between Afrikaans and Dutch, she can follow along with us both at any speed and when the discussion gets animated she's usually designated "interpreter".
Have you tried listening to Flemish? It's a lot easy to understand as an Afrikaaner compared to normal Dutch
Many years ago I spoke to a Namibian guy and I had the same experience! It was my only experience talking to an Afrikaans speaker
@@whitefang9758 A couple of months ago I was at a station near my home town here in the Netherlands where I heard two ladies conversing in this very peculiar Dutch dialect, or so I thought at first. I could only partly understand what they were saying and speculated that maybe they were from the Maastricht-Aachen region, that being a "hors système" area for me as far as my knowledge of Dutch dialects goes, but they would regularly throw in English words for everyday items, and then it finally dawned to me that they were in fact speaking Afrikaans. Such a strange experience. I love the idea that while separated by such a great physical distance, we still can connect by way of our language.
I speak Engish and French s a German, so when I watched a documentary, I think about Lupita Nyongo, and the subtitles were in Africans while she visited places in Africa, I was very surprised I got the gist of it about 80%.
This person speaking Dutc was more like under 5% for me!
As a native German speaker, I never hear Dutch and confuse it with my own language. I think it is very distinct and I say that coming from a region where we have a dialect that is closer to Dutch
Agreed. It’s like comparing French and Italian. Similar vocab and grammar but pronunciation is so different.
I agree completely, the sounds are so different that it's almost hard to confuse the two.
Im from Brazil and It was pretty close to me when I did not have much contact with German and Dutch. After moving to the Netherlands I started to recognize them, and then recognizing de Dutch from Belgium and from the Netherlands
spielen(German) = spelen(Dutch) = to play
Spielplatz(german) = speelplaats(Dutch) = children's play place/area
You were looking for 'playground'
I thought just a few hours ago that I finally hit that point where UA-cam didn't know which language to set my ads to... Then I realised my VPN was just set to Germany
In Portugal we don't dubb, we use subtitles
That's why the porruguese girl said she heard more German than Dutch.
We also hear Italian occasionally, comissário Montalbano, Gamorra, La Piolvora, Golpo Grosso 😀
09:50 German "Kind" and English "kid" are not cognates, surprisingly. The English Term "kid" originally meant a young goat. It somehow began to mean human children as well at some point, so it's really a slang term. Its German cognate is "Kitz", which also means a young goat, but not human children. The German word "Kind" is from a different root and has no cognates in modern English.
Complete guess but is kindergarten (Like a child's day care) potentially related
@@domenicfieldhouse5644 Yes, but it a direct loan from German.
@@domenicfieldhouse5644 Yes kindergarten is a German word borrowed into English. It literally means "children's garden".
Duden - Das Herkunftswörterbuch
Kind
Mhd. kint, ahd., asächs. kind und niederl. kind gehen auf das substantivierte 2. Partizip germ. * kénþa- »gezeugt, geboren« zurück. Eng verwandt sind die nord. Wortgruppe um aisl. kind »Geschlecht, Stamm« und engl. kind »Geschlecht, Gattung, Art« sowie die ablautende Bildung aisl. kundr »Sohn; Verwandter«. Die germ. Wortgruppe gehört mit verwandten Bildungen in anderen idg. Sprachen zu der Wurzel * g̑en(ə)- »gebären, erzeugen«, vgl. z. B. aind. jātá- »geboren«, »Geschlecht, Art«, lat. natus (alat. gnatus) »geboren«, »Sohn«, »Tochter«, natio »Geburt, (Er)zeugung; Geschlecht, Stamm« (↑ Nation), natura »Geburt; angeborene Beschaffenheit, Wesen« (↑ Natur), praegnas »schwanger, trächtig« (↑ prägnant). Zu der idg. Wurzel * g̑en(ə)- »gebären, erzeugen« gehören ferner die germ. Wortgruppe von ↑ König (»Mann aus vornehmem Geschlecht«) und aus anderen idg. Sprachen, z. B. lat. gens »Geschlecht, Sippe« und genus »Geschlecht, Art, Gattung« (s. die weitverzweigte Wortgruppe um ↑ Genus).
Abl.: Kindheit (mhd. kintheit, ahd. kindheit); kindisch (mhd. kindisch, ahd. kindisc »jung, kindartig, kindlich«, seit mhd. Zeit auch abwertend »albern, einfältig«); kindlich (mhd. kintlich, ahd. chindlīh).
Zus.: Kindergarten (19. Jh.); Kinderhort (19. Jh.; vgl. ↑ Hort); Kinderstube (15. Jh.; zunächst im Sinne von »Schule«, seit dem Ende des 19. Jh.s dann im Sinne von »Erziehung, Manieren«); Kindeskind (mhd. kindeskint; gebildet wie Helfershelfer und Zinseszins).
@@domenicfieldhouse5644 taking Herman words like Waldsterben or Fernweh doesn‘t make them English, neither does for Kindergarten.
Americans disappropriating the meaning also doeanÄt mean sh!t.
As a German her Statement of 'hey this Sounds Like German but actually it's dutch' is true, like i watch Football and When Arjen Robben talked in dutch you could clearly understand some words and you know in what direction He is going. Very similar
As a German, I don't think Dutch sounds so similar that I sometimes mistake it for German. But they are linguistically quite close. Unless you studied Dutch or you come from the North West of Germany where the dialects on both sides of the border blend into each other, spoken Dutch is quite hard to understand for native German speakers. This is because the pronunciations differ quite a lot. But written Dutch is comparatively easy to understand, even if you've never studied it. A rough comparison might be the similarity between Portuguese and Spanish, or Italian and Spanish. When I'm abroad on holiday and crave for a newspaper (which is rare) and there's no German language one available, I sometimes like to buy a Dutch newspaper and have fun the rest of the day with the guesswork. Depending on the difficulty of the text, I'd say I understand between 60 and 90 percent. North Germans have it easier than South Germans, because Northern dialects (Low German, and related dialects like Westphalian or my native Berlin dialect) have more similarities with Dutch than Southern dialects.
That is true, spoken Dutch, if it's not Flemish, is really hard to understand. It sounds like they always have an undissolvable cotton ball in their mouth when they speak. But written Dutch is indeed so much easier. I met a dutch girl on vacation once and she lent me a book of hers, I was able to follow the gist of it perfectly fine.
You should compare the Northern 'Low German' to Nedersaksisch, those 'dialects' are essentially the same language. Over here Nedersaksisch is now recognised as its own language, I could speak my language to an older farmer in Northern Germany who still speaks the language and we can likely have a regular conversation, it's pretty fascinating to me how little it has changed. Sadly all these dialects and languages are dying out fast because young people are now taught to avoid speaking it because it sounds 'uneducated' and you have to speak the universal bastardised language.
5:00 - It's not that surprising because we subtitle all foreign series and many movies here in Portugal, Metatron. I actually do the same as her, I've been following a german series on our 2nd national channel (RTP2) and after a few episodes I sometimes find myself not looking at the subtitles for some words/expressions that they use more often.
The dutch guy is speaking awefull dutch tbh, very poor accent, like the guy has been living abroad for 15 years
The Dutch speaker doesn't speak native Dutch. Actually it's pretty bad to the point that it sounds like he inserted English propositions translated into Dutch. Also in my life I have not heard a Dutch person refer to the handle of a cup as hendel. Which technically is correct, but not vocabulary. That would ear (oor of oortje).
9:47
No, actually!
The word “kid” entered English via the Old Norse “kið” from Proto-Germanic “*kidją” further from either “*gʰaydn-” or “*ǵʰaydn-“ (goat) or “*gidʰ-“ (goatling) in Proto-Indo-European.
The German word it’s related to is “Kitz(e)” (“baby goat” among other animals).
German “Kind” is from the Proto-Germanic “*kindą” or “*kinþą“ from Proto-Indo-European “*ǵenh₁-“ which meant “to give birth.”
The English word directly related to this one is “kin.”
@@LEO_M1 in some Friesian dialects kid means foal.
And the English noun "kind", even, from *kinþiz. The Dutch equivalent of "kin" is "kunne", meaning "gender", both from *kunja(n).
As a native Dutch speaker myself, I can hear this guy is not a native Dutch-speaker but has learnt Dutch. The pronunciation is not so smooth, nor is it fast
7:53 that makes sense based on the what i’ve learned from singing songs in Italian from LazyTown. (This is my odd way of learning language’s pronunciation as of late)
There’s a line “what goes up must come down” in one of the songs.
1:31 A Dutch rpg steamer said that he doesn't read Dutch books anymore, he reads English editions.
A lemon isn’t sweet
German girl threw me for a loop when she described hands lol. I am a native german speaker, so linguistically there was no issue. But when she described hands, she said "man hat 10 Stück davon" = "you have 10 of them" which made me think of fingers. So, similarily with the guy who confused sour and sweet, she made a mistake talking about fingers when she should've stuck to hands. If the other guests had understood more German they would likely have been thrown off too.
Yes the guy isn't native, he responded to comments the original video stop bashing him. I think it is kind of cool he was taught Dutch by his parents despite not growing up in the Netherlands and it is quite special if someone is willing to learn Dutch. And yes the Netherlands has the highest English index for English speakers in countries where English is not the native language. Which is just as high as in Malta which has English as one of the official languages. Also, c'mon man you Italians have sweet lemons that you can eat with peel ;)
As a german i have a hard time understanding spoken dutch, written dutch is easier. However im from the south and its easier for those in the rural north as their dialects are much close to dutch.
Its the same with the swiss but the other way round. Understanding them is not that hard, but for those from the north it is extremely hard.
As for the word guessing. The way they are describing the word makes it hard to guess for me even if i understand the language. So with the german girl describing child you really had to get the first 3 words, otherwise you were completely lost.
plattdeutsch dialect you mean?
it's very similar, we tend to get tourists here from hamburg area, we just speak our own language and can understand eachother.
@@lebell79 plat is one of them. Frisian is a bit different but also closer than anything we speak here in the south and i fathom there must be more.
@@_aullik you understand frisian?
you do better than me!
@@lebell79 No... with all strong the "plat" dialects i can guess a bit and i imagine to understand more than with dutch, but if i had to speak to them i would be completely lost.
@@_aullik when you talk slow there shouldnt be too many issues is my experience.
He got lemon wrong we actually say: citroen not limoen. Limoen is the dutch word for lime.
As native Dutch is very easy to distinguish (high) German from (standard) Dutch. But even for me it's sometimes hard to understand some of the Dutch dialects, especially the eastern ones (I'm from the west). I can understand and read German pretty easily, but if they go on fully dialect, it's all gibberish to me as well. I also recognize Swiss and Austrian German, but I have to listen carefully to understand it (the latter is easier for me).
It's like Portugese, if you're native you will immediately know if someone is from Portugal or from Brazil. By now, after listening to a lot of language content, I can hear the difference as well, but it still takes some time.
No one can understand the Swiss once they switch into their Cantonese dialects, trust me!
I was in Zurich, visiting my Equadorian friend who was staying with family, learning German…we sat in a bus when a woman tried getting on with a large German Shephard Dog.
She and the bus driver got into quite a heated discussion, and my Equadorian friend looked at me for a translation, only to see me shaking my head in frustration, because I hand‘t caught one word!
It was such an uniquely emberassing situation! 😅
If you study Dutch and German a little more, you will notice that the individual words are often very similar, just written and pronounced slightly differently. The grammar is also quite similar, although Dutch is a little more "cleared out". German carries a lot of old stuff with it. Dutch and Low German are even more similar in pronunciation, because neither has undergone the second sound shift.
I think the fact that the German speaker was a woman made them also say it was easier to understand. And yeah, German is a bit more widespread than Dutch, especially here in Europe. However, like you said, many people just know German from WW2 movies etc. which isn't a nice representation and hence the stereotype of German always sounding angry. But you can hear that that's obviously not the case when you listen to her.
Another difference was that she appeared to be a native speaker.
I can understand quite a bit of written German, but not much of it when it's spoken, from my experience it's the same among my fellow Dutchies.
I like the sound of German, I see people often calling it harsh sounding, but i never really had that impression.
as a german I also can understand most written Dutch, but spoken Dutch is pretty hard.
if a Dutch speaker speaks very slowly, usually it's possible understand most of it, at least if you vaguely know the context.
Is a cup for tea? Did this Brazilian girl just arrive from Mars? In Brazil, xícara is also for coffee.
As a Dutch... Lets see..
Lets gooooo!
1:50 English is a basic class in school.
6:44 his way of describing the cup is so strange . Clearly not a full native Dutch speaker. But, he does the best he can.
11:09 we are nice... 😂
12:26 when the lemon is baked on top of the fish, it loses some of the sourness, but then again, he is not fully a native Dutch speaker. 😅
13:25 we call a lemon, also Citroen, a limoen is the greenish kind.
Again, not a true native Dutch speaker.
This is fun, but a shame they got a person who learned Dutch later, not as a Child. He made the gap between German and Dutch seem bigger.
I'm Dutch, seems correct. The guy is clearly not an Amsterdammer though. I wonder, maybe someone at the border of Germany? Okay, that dude is not actually Dutch. That becomes clear halfway through.
When on vacation, we always play 'guess the Dutch' when we're at dinner and 9/10 times, they turn out to be German.
If you want to watch something in German, watch 'Dark'.
That an Italian is so puzzled by the fact that the over 90% of Dutch people can speak English, cracked me up. Italy is notorious for their combination of few English speakers and their refusal to engage in foreign languages even if they can speak them. Italy is on place 32 in the ranking of English speakers in Europe. Only Turkey, Aserbeidschan and France are worse according to the epi (English proficiency index)
whenever i open a metatron video i always put on a paper crown beforehand being all ready to be called a "noble one" 👑
Dutch here; I don't know if the number is correct, but the only person i knew that couldn't speak at least a little bit of English has died of old age. Her husband has enough dementia to have lost his ability to understand foreign languages, so he might be in the 4%.
To my Italian ears, I find something interesting happening. I find that I prefer the sound of nederlands to deutsch when they are speaking their languages because nederlands has a more fluid flow to the language and deutsch has more of a choppy flow. However, when they are speaking English, I prefer the sound of German accents for some reason because they sound more exotic to me than Dutch which sounds more similar to a neutral English accent.
I live in south-west Germany, at the french-swiss border. I have already problems understanding the northern german dialects, they sound like they speak with a potatoe in their mouth. Dutch is even harder (like a drunk northern german with a boiling hot potatoe in their mouth). Written dutch is a bit easier, but it's more like kiiiinda understanding every 3rd or 4th word, and it's like you can nearly grasp the meaning, but not really, gives me a headache.
On the other hand, people from the north-west, living closer to the dutch border, can totally understand dutch (if they speak a bit slower), cause their dialect is very influenced.
There are 'false friends' between German and Dutch, such as 'klaarkomen' which means 'to get by' in German, and 'to ejaculate' in Dutch. Though German and Dutch are similar,
there is considerable difference between them. I'm particularly aware of this, as I speak Dutch to communication level, and I'm currently attempting to learn some German, by
comparing Dutch and German vocabulary, which is proving to be an interesting experience.
As a native Dutchman, his Dutch was grammatically not the best. Anyway, nice video Metatron.
When I hear Dutch I never think, "Wait, is this German?". I immediately know that it's not German and I also don't realize that it's Dutch right away. To me Dutch sound like funny gibberish with a few German words thrown in now and then. That may depend on which region of Germany you're from.
React to the interview with the Brazilian man who studied over 150 languages in his 89 years on this planet.
He lived and taught in Bolivia, Italy, Serbia and went to many other countries. He had a degree in Germanic languages and a degree in Romance languages, which he did at the same time. He studied on average 2 new languages per year and claimed a conversational level I about 30. He studied Mandarin, Japanese, about every Slavic language, Yoruba (which he found too hard), etc..
And , the best of all, he wrote a book with 60 poems in 60 languages, which he translated to Portuguese. The book has both the original poems and his translation. The title of the book is Babel de poemas. The man name's is Carlos Amaral Freire. In the interview he talks about Mandarin and how impossible it is to properly translate Mandarin to other languages and he reads a poem in Mandarin.
If you are interested in reacting to the interview I could find the highlights you'd probably be more interested in reacting to. The interview is in Portuguese, but it has UA-cam auto dubbing.
It is not true that 96% of the people in the Netherlands speak English. In any case not the working class. In the place where I work they is no one who can speak good English. Only "good morning" and "How do you do". But maybe it is different with higher educated people.
can they hold their own in a basic conversation?
Most of the working class people i know do speak english pretty good, might depend a bit on the region they are from. Maybe in the bible belt its not as common. Its definitely not only the higher educated people who speak good english. The basic is the same for all of us. Only the younger kids series or movies are dubbed in dutch. The rest is always subtitled in dutch this also applies for german or french.
@@thijs166 the variation of English proficiency is because of educational level rather than a regional or gender issue. There is little to no difference in English proficiency between provinces, or urban vs. rural population, or men vs women.
@@thijs166 This has nothing to do with the Bible. The working class has a very limited knowledge of English. They are not able to have a conversation. This is my experience. Watching movies, people just read the subtitles. They don't pay attention to what is spoken.
For me as a German Dutch sounds quite like a German dialect (no offense meant ^^). I grew up with a grandmother who spoke Plattdeutsch (Lower German) which is quite similar to Dutch. And as a teenager I had a Dutch boyfriend and one day I noticed that I could understand nearly everything his family members said in Dutch although I wasn't even trying. You just have to flip the switch in your head as if you were listening to someone speaking a dialect.
The reason is that there is (or at least was) a Dialect continuum that include all German and Dutch varieties. The border of Germany and the Netherlands has nothing to do with differences in languages or dialects. It is based on political developments over the centuries.
As a Native German speaker, it is easier for me to understand written Dutch then spoken Dutch.
In general Dutch seems to me like Low German spoken in North-West Germany with a thick thick thick Accent.
For example when the Dutch Speaker said the word for Juice is "Sap" it reminded me of the german "Saft".
So similarities are there but for non germanic Speakers they are not so obvious to hear.
Dutch sounds like a very hard german dialect, we still have one that is very similar "plattdeutsch"
Dutch is much easier. I even understood it as a baby 🙂
Kudos to the Guy speaking 3 languages, but he has quite an accent and definitely sounds different from a native speaker ( The Netherlands of Belgium)
one of the reasons so many native Dutch speakers are proficient in English is the fact that TV and films are always subtitled. So we are exposed quite early and often exposed to English, with the translation provided.
its called compound words in english or kofferworter in german (the suitecase word where you put multiple meanings in )
@metatron this idea about put chocolate in cappuccino came from Brazil because it's a Brazilian cultural manor
I suspect the Dutch guy grew up in a foreign country with a Dutch parent. The accent is alright but the intonation is off, the syntax mistakes give away that he's not completely fluent in the language. I'm pretty sure a Dutch native speaker good have played with the vocabulary and intonation a bit to make it easier for them to understand like what the German girl was doing
I think I can answer your question about Dutch people speaking English, I'm not sure what the percentage is but I would assume it to be higher than at least 80% for every age group of the native Dutch population. For example, my grandmother comes from a lower class family and is nearly 83 years old, she dropped out of high school at age 14, but she can easily manage a conversation in English. Not without mistakes or about convoluted topics, but normal conversations she can manage fine.
The reason why so many Dutch people speak English puzzles me somewhat. One explanation is that Dutch is closely related to English, but I feel like German also is pretty closely related to English and the Germans are much worse at speaking English on average. Maybe it's because we don't like dubbed movies or television programmes, so we hear English more often on the TV than in Germany. Or maybe it's because the Dutch are simply more involved in international trade. Or maybe the Dutch like traveling abroad because our country is very small. We also had English and French speaking reformed churches in Amsterdam since the 17th century, so maybe the Dutch simply like other languages.
I think the word you were looking for is "compound words". It's actually quite easy to learn the longer words when you learn the meanings of the compound words themselves (Which are very much shorter and easily digestible) and then add them together. I'm German myself and work with a lot of Dutch and have to say that it's very distinct. If you've ever heard a handful of Dutch speak of course you could get confused for a second, but when you hear it daily you can easily hear when it's not German that's being spoken. Even with years of experience hearing Dutch I still can barely understand a word, even if I speak English and German. Only thing that helps is my grandparents used to speak only in Kleverländisch (Platt) to each other and me and that helps me out somewhat sometimes. Reading on the other hand is very easy when I take my time and mix the knowledge of German, English and Platt together 😀
He has a very strange Dutch accent, it definitely does not sound native at all. The cadence and pronunciation feels like someone speaking Afrikaans to me
Although very distantly related, Dutch reminds me of Irish/Sottisc Gaelic, with their trilled 'Rs' and throaty 'Kh' sounds.
As a German I found the girl easier to understand. Germans who are still able to speak low German as in "Plattdeutsch" might have an easier time to understand Dutch. Otherwise it's distinctive enough.
I'm an Italian born and raised in the Netherlands and yes everyone speaks English. You don't even need to know Dutch to live/work here. I went to an international school, so I can't speak from experience, but Dutch kids are taught it extensively in school.
Edit: yeah his Dutch is weird. My dutch isnt perfect and i havent lived there in 8 years but his Dutch isn't perfect either
The guy speaking Dutch has some aspects in his accent that sounds to me, a native Dutch speaker (speaking English myself also, and can understand, but not speak, German almost as well as English), that his first language is probably English due to his vowels and the pronunciation of his 'r. Not quite sure if this makes it easier to understand by someone not speaking Dutch or harder. Also, he's using some incorrect words ('limoen' is not a 'lemon' in Dutch, it's "citroen")
the way he pronounces 'kind' sounds like his Swiss German accent is coming through. The Dutch 'k' has a subtle distinct quality from the German 'k' (just try to find the way, for example, the Dutch say 'koffie' compared to the German 'Kaffee') .. the German 'k' is much closer to the English 'c' in 'coffee', distinctly more aspirated.
His 'hand' is also in a clear German accent
I'm dutch and tought he was talking about oranges.
People's reference for German are mostly WWII movies, it partially explains why everyone think it sounds harsh.
Northern dialects of German/Frisian, for me, are almost indistinguishable from Dutch. I spent a few hours studying Dutch years ago, and I can still understand 60-80% of normal conversations.
I am Afrikaans, which is derived from Dutch. I can understand a lot Dutch and German, especially when I read it. Maybe look into the the connection between Dutch and Afrikaans? That would be amazing.
Ps. I understood the the Dutch guy better than the German girl...
Nederlands is de moedertaal van Afrikaans. Het klinkt voor ons een beetje als kinderlijk Nederlands omdat het vaak versimpeld is. Ik denk dat jij kan begrijpen wat hier staat. Ons vir jou 🇳🇱 ❤ 🇿🇦
@De_Vliegende_Hollander Ja, ek kan dit verstaan! Dis lekker om nie net Engels te lees en sien nie. It's so interesting how languages are developed!
The connection is... colonization and slavery...
I'd definitely agree with the assessment, that Dutch sounds like broken German sometimes. It sits in that spot where you think you just have to understand it, but can't quite manage. It's even more present when reading it, compared to listening.
The lad is clearly not a native speaker.
Limoen is lime... Citroen is lemon in Dutch. And lime is sweeter than lemon (if it's sweet is quite subjective though)
As the other person above said, you can say "Ich mag Zitronen". You could also say "Ich habe Zitronen gern", though as I'm not a native German speaker, I don't know which is more common. Then again, you might not use "gern haben" in that context.
Actually lemons and limes are very sweet, just like pineappele is very sour, it's just that the contrary taste is overpowering.
The problem with German is that, from all languages, it's the most similar to Dutch but still different. That makes learning German sometimes tricky as you think the exact same word might mean the same in both languages and it doesn't.
They are both germanic languages.
In my German dialect a cup would be "Küppken".
In mine it would by "Häferl".
German here. I think both choose pretty awkward descriptions that made it hard to grasp the dedicated subject. Though I know some Nederlands phrases the duch guy was particularly hard to understand for me. Germans actually don't bother to learn Nederlands because we believe most Dutch people understand and speak decent German anyways. Which is a shame IMO. And well if German doesn't work switching to English indeed seems to be a widely applicable option.
Also you'll often hear people make pun of Nederlands saying it sounds like German spoken with a hot potatoe in your mouth. Though that is pretty rude I can kinda relate to it because German already is a pretty throathy language with its gutteral ch- and r-sounds but the Nederlands g or gr just seems to excel at that.
01:50
Like Language Jones says "English spoken silly".
Dutch people say words that’s Norwegian words, often words, we do not use so often anymore. Its probably more related then German.
Dutch doesnt have the high german consonant shift which the norse languages also dont have. But low german is even closer than both high german and dutch.
It was spoken at the border of denmark and germany so they influenced each other a bit.
Dutch guy is possibly hasn't lived in the Netherlands for a while. Dutch people who go on to be expats in other countries relatively quickly forget correct Dutch pronunciations. Some famous media people who went to the U.S. for a couple of years sound more like they speak Afrikaans when they come back. But maybe he's only second generation Dutch, meaning his parents are Dutch but he hasn't really lived in the Netherlands?
8:57 funny that she says "hart", we'd normally say "schwer" oder "schwierig", but if you speak tons of English, you'd mix the words up and say "hart" 😂
2:20 I have that more with Danish because to a High German speaker who speaks the standard dialect, it sounds like phonetically identical gibberish, which is really odd. Dutch, to me, is more like German with well different phonetics. It's very distinct though, so I'd never confuse it for German. However, I can understand some of it, unlike with Danish. Funnily enough, I understood more Norwegian than I would Danish when I was in Norway for a competition once (I didn't quite understand everything but I always knew what people were talking about, more or less).
3:15 - in most places outside of Italy, barista's will put chocolate powder on a cappuccino whether you ask or not. Just like the Pizza that most of the world knows is American-style pizza etc. Italia created it, but a different version became the most popular worldwide. She could have said Mocha though, would have been more accurate...
I would argue against the idea that "the pizza most of the world knows is american style Pizza." Especially here in europe that's not the case.
The biggest difference to italians are the toppings, as a real Pizza according to italians is a Margherita and has no other toppings. But the dough and stuff are the italian way usually here in europe.
@@nirfz In all of Asia, Africa, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia & South and Central America American pizza is way more well known. This accounts for the vast majority of the population of the world...
I personally think Italian (real) pizza is superior in every way, but facts are facts.
1:25 if I remember correctly The Netherlands is the non-native English speaking country with the most English proficiency, however if for Belgium it was split by region, Flanders would take the cake.
The English in the Netherlands is better, although the difference is not as big as with German, but our French is terrible. The laugh with our French, which is fair, unfortunately.
Native Dutch speaker here. Overall I find that English proficiency in the Netherlands is a little overrated. I definitely don't believe the 96% figure (maybe if we define speaking English as being okay with very basic interactions like directions, shopping and stuff). I live in a fairly big city and the number of people in their 20s and 30s who still struggle with natural and conversational English is honestly a little embarrassing given how people in this country self-assess themselves as being very proficient.
Tbh, of all the generations, I think the younger ones are by far the most proficient because of the internet.
he likes the sound of the dutch language :D
In brazilian portuguese "Lemon" its "Limão Siciliano" and "lime" its "Limão-taiti". If you say "limão" people will give you a "Limão-taiti" (at least in my region).
German here. Germany is not very homogeneous in terms of dialects. People from north west Germany will understand Dutch better than Saxons or Bavarians, for example, simply because it’s more similar to how they speak German.
It’s true that the Dutch are more proficient in English than, for example, Germans, because they don’t dub movies and get much exposure to English cultural products. Yet, it’s the fact that there are 90 million native speakers of German in Europe that makes dubbing movies and television and translating books into German much more economically viable. English has the largest market for such products and will create larger quantities of different titles. On the other hand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland translate more content from different languages into German, than the English speaking world translates non-English content into English, in percentage of the overall number of films, programs or books available. Conversely, it is also less economical to translate from languages like French, Italian, Spanish or Czech or Greek into Dutch, than into German.
So the proficiency in English is a kind of mixed blessing. English is the world’s first foreign language and will give you access to a great many sources and opportunities. But it also creates a strong bias towards sources that are in English, because non-English content has to overcome the barrier towards an already crowded market, to make it into English. As a result, mediocre English stuff can easily get a greater audience than the finest content from smaller languages. When translating and dubbing are an accepted investment in the eyes of the distributor, there is a more level playing field.
Thankfully, many Dutch people will speak two or three or even more foreign languages. Many speak German, and also French or Spanish. In my eyes, that’s even better than relying entirely on translations to understand what’s going on elsewhere in the world.
Ik spreek überhaupt geen woord Duits.
I am German and I completely understand your sentence
@@LiorSultanov I think the joke is that überhaupt is a loan word from german
I live and work in the Netherlands near the German border. At school we learn at least 3 languages, Dutch (of course), English and German. Despite this, English is the second language for the vast majority of Dutch people under the age of 60. Also here in the border area. The people speak English almost as well as Dutch and switch effortlessly to English when the situation requires it. The reason for this is that we watch all English spoken films in English with Dutch subtitles. It's like having English lessons every day while watching TV. In the past, most Dutch people spoke better German than English. That also has to do with TV. In the 70s, 80s and part of the 90s there were at most 3 Dutch channels in the Netherlands, a Belgian channel, the BBC and a few German channels. So a lot of German TV was watched and now it is the case that Germans do not use subtitles, but dubbing. The first time I saw The Terminator it was on the German channel (yes, I'm getting old). According to this German channel, the film was called Der Terminator and Arnie did not say ill be back but Ich komme wieder. Now I regularly have Germans as customers. The generation under 40 often tries frantically and imperfectly in English because they know that the chance that they will be helped properly is greater. I always see a sigh of relief when I answer them in German and tell them that they can speak German to me.
Also, the guy speaking Dutch, isnt Dutch.
from my experience you cant understand dutch as a german. a few words are similar or the same, but at normal conversation speed you have no chance of getting whats being said.
8:08 I think "Pick me up" might be even better.
This was interesting but they should have picked a native Dutch speaker. I'm Dutch and I had trouble following him at time. There was also the mistake that he mixed up two fruits. A limoen is a lime. It should have been citroen.
I find much Dutch people will be able to understand German. I was never had a lesson in German and I understand about 90% of what's spoken or writen.
I also watched a lot of German shows on tv. Nothing gets subbed here, unless it's a child show, so I watched a lot of crime shows in German. So I just picked up things as a child.
Indeed a lot of Dutch people how are under 50/60ths can speak pretty good English. Usually through a mix of the school system and things you just hear around you in your suroundings.
I disagree here.... most Dutch would always say they understand German for 90% and can speak it. As a German actually speaking both languages I can tell you....its not true. You understand about 30%. I do ageee with you on the Dutch guy. He has a heavy German accent
German is my second language, and spoken Dutch sounds almost German to me. I love how it sounds!
@Metatron
I wouldn't the believe 96% part tbh. Especially if it's talking about fluency.
As a german speaker who is currently learning dutch: the german lady was terrible at explaining her words, the dutch guy did a much better job
The English language has adapted many German words. By the way; the Dutch language is actually a variation of Frisian - as the Frisians in northern Germany still speak it in a more modern version. The word "Dutch" is actually a mistake in the English language, because it actually means Deutsch (German).
For me as German, I could not understand the Dutch guy despite the Dutch are using often similar words. The reason for is the accent because I don't have these problems when I look on a written dutch text for example in e-mails I get at work.
The dutch language sounds for me like a mix of German and Englisch spoken by someone that is chewing on something while speaking. There are sometimes individual words I notice but mostly it could also be some Aliens langauge.
And the German Woman was very bad in explanation of things. I was not even sure if she really meant the Hand or if she meant the 10 Finger instead.