Native English speaker here too, but I speak Dutch and know a couple people who tried or are learning it, I’ve noticed they can’t get the r, neither the trill with the tongue or the one in the back of the throat, can’t really do the what’s it called, gooise r? They just all say it like the American r. They also pronounce the s like way too sharp? I don’t know if that makes sense but the Dutch s feels soft and warm and the American s feels sharp. They can’t get the w, it’s either like an American w or v, and never the Dutch one. They pronounce ee like ey, ij like eye, oo like ou, uu like oe? The hoer/huur mixup is hilarious, ui sounds like au. It’s like aside from the g, Dutch and American English are like almost the same pronunciation, but it’s like just barely different enough to make some important distinctions hard to tell apart
@@christianstainazfischer I always think it’s funny that they keep messing up pretty much every vowel, while it can make a huge difference in what you’re actually trying to say (Najib with huursubsidie still is funny) 🤣 and pretty much every English speaking UA-camr annoys me with the ‘Goeda Cheese’ and ‘Stroepwaffels’ at some point 😑 And English is far from phonetic (I mean; Book, Blood, Door, Food, Cooperation, Brooch. How on earth should you know how to pronounce the ‘OO’ in those words? So compared to that, finding the correct Dutch pronunciation should be a piece of cake and could avoid a lot of misunderstandings 😂 Have you ever told people to try to gargle, to get where the sound comes from, to master the rolling R? That might help. 😊
One of my favourite lesser-known features of Dutch is the use of Modal Particles. These are words like 'even', 'misschien', 'gewoon' and 'toch', which communicate a mutual emotion or understanding about what is being said. It's a feature that can make translating sentences from Dutch rather tricky, because communicating this mutual understanding can lead to rather verbose sentences. For example, when you say "Mag ik jouw pen even lenen?", the 'even' in the sentence implies that you only want to borrow the pen for a short period, and not for the full day. Similarly, you can say "Ga gewoon naar bed" to someone who's complaining about being tired, where the 'gewoon' part implies that going to bed is the most logical option here. These can also be combined, to create a whopper of a sentence like: "Luister nou toch eens gewoon". I think the best way to translate this would be something similar to "For the love of God, will you please listen for a moment?" To break this down: - Luister: means listen - nou: indicates frustration - toch: makes the frustration from 'nou' even bigger - gewoon: it's in everyone's best interest that the person this is being said to listens to the speakers - eens: indicates that the person needs to listen now, in this very moment - even: indicates that the person only needs to listen for a little bit, not the entire day. It's a feature that all Dutchies do natively, but never realise that it's it's own thing! Most of the examples I've sourced from this website, it has some more in depth examples: zichtbaarnederlands.nl/nl/adverbium/modale_partikels
As a Dutch person fluent in English, this is just... wow... I never realised. I just translate sentences naturally but I never do it word for word (because grammar, obviously). I dont even think about what I write, I just know its correct. (There are some words that need googling every time like "answer" and "wednesday" because who thought it would be a good idea to pronounce those in a differnt way than they're written.)
As a native Dutch person learning about the complexities in most of these rules for the first time, I'm pretty sure I actually don't know how to speak Dutch. I've just been lucky with repeating what sounds instinctually good to me 🙃
Dutch speaker here, mad respect for the honestly near perfect attempts at speaking and writing Dutch in parts of the video where you didn’t even really need to. With some of the large paragraphs I noticed a few small grammatical errors, and sometimes some of the words or phrasings used wete awkward or archaic, but overall this is by far the most successful Dutch writing and speaking I’ve ever heard like this from a non-native speaker. Very impressive! It’s so very clear how much effort and genuine care you put into making this video. As a linguistics enthusiast myself, this was an absolute joy to watch. Videos as in depth as these make me realise how blinded I have become by this sense of normality, in regards to how utterly ridiculous our silly little language can be at times.
7:52 Imagine someone saying "ik wil géén appels" ("I /don't/ want apples"). The accents make it clear the person really doesn't want apples, probably after having been insistently offered them.
Differs from, ík wil geen appels (it is I who doesn't want the apples) Ik wíl geen appels (I don't want apples, but I do some other verb apples) Ik wil geen áppels (I don't want apples, but I do want something else)
I noticed 2 inacuracies in the video: - at 23:47 the perfect tense of eten is gegeten. With a g in the middle and no trema. I think it is the only verb that does this as I cant come up with another example. - at 27:49 the sentence doesnt really make a whole lot of sense in Dutch. Grammatically it is correct but the choice of words made me guess as to what the meaning was until I saw the English translation. For 'notice' a better translation is 'opmerken/opgemerkt'. I don't even know what bemerken really means😅. I think it is an old fashioned word that is not common anymore. But an even better word here would simply have been 'zien/gezien'. Just like English 'seen' would have fit. Opgemerkt would be a closer translation of noticed, but I guess 4/5 people would use gezien if they were to construct the Dutch sentence on their own without translating. And 'dekking' does mean cover, but only really in a battlefield context. As in to give cover (dekking geven/dekken), or take cover (dekking zoeken). In the sense of one object physically covering another one, there is the word 'bedekken' as a verb, but the noun 'bedekking' is way less widely applicable than 'cover'. In most cases, a Dutch person would name the specific object that is covering by its own name rather than refer to it by the general noun 'cover'. In this case, if the cover were a blanket, we would use 'deken' (which, now that I think of it, is itself derived from the verb 'dekken' which is kinda ironic. As is 'deksel' which means lid 🤔. But if it were a box we would say 'doos'). The verb 'verwijderen' would then also be changed accordingly to fit the blanket. For a blanket this would probably be to pull off or pull away, or 'eraf trekken' in Dutch (not to be confused with aftrekken which means to jerk off) and for deksel it would be 'eraf draaien', meaning to 'twist off'. And finally the word 'sinds' sounds a bit off, but idk why. Maybe it is more common in a historical context. Here I would have used 'nadat', which means after. But 'sinds' is stricly speaking correct. So a more natural sentence would be: "onze konijnen hebben het geld niet gezien nadat ze het deken eraf hebben getrokken" or "our rabbits haven't seen the money after they pulled off the blanket". I guess that in English it is way more common/natural to constrct a sentence using these general verbs and nouns like remove and cover. In Dutch, one would be more specific. It is kinda funny to me that I did understand the English sentence whilst not getting what the Dutch one was supposed to mean. Otherwise it is a great video and really impressive to have been made by a non native speaker.
I think for “sinds” it has to with whether it’s describing cause and effect or time. Because “sinds” has more to do with time. I.e. it would fit with “we haven’t seen him since May” (“we hebben hem sinds mei niet meer gezien”) but not “we haven’t been able to see him, since he moved” (“we hebben hem niet kunnen zien, omdat hij verhuist is”) Basically - can you replace it with “after” or with “because”? If it’s “after” it would probably work, if it’s “because” probably not. (And there’s probably differences for each region of the Netherlands too - I’m from the north-east and hear “sinds” said very often)
@@corinneeaglebridge zelf kom ik uit Meppel, dus dat moet niet heel erg verschillen in dialect dan 😅. Geen idee waarom, maar sinds klinkt hier toch een beetje verengelsd ofzo. Ik zou de zin zelf anders hebben opgebouwd denk ik.
As a native the most surprising factoid was the stress/klemtoon part. The rules for that never made sense to me, probably because it has never been properly taught to me as the instruction the teachers gave us amounted to "just figure it out lolol". You spent a whole grand total of 2 seconds on that, but I have learnt more from those 2 seconds than 18 years of formal education (at least on the subject of klemtonen). My contribution to the 'add something interesting' prompt at the end: The verbstem + ze conjugation. Eg. "werkze". "eetze". "loopze", and it means something like "good luck/have fun with working/eating/walking" ('Eetze' could be loosely translated as 'bon appetit'). Apparently this 'success imperative' is something exclusive to Dutch and it is mega weird.
Sorry maar je "werkze, eetze en loopze" samentrekking is (nog) niet correct. Dit is een gebiedende wijs vorm. Eet ze! bij het voorschotelen van een stel boterhammen met kaas staat nou eenmaal netter dan "Eet de boterhammen!" maar de "ze" is contextueel en waarschijnlijk een verzachting van de gebiedende wijs. Volgens OnzeTaal/VanDale komt de stamze samenvoeging wel vaker voor tegenwoordig maar is nog niet officieel erkend; dus misschien ben jij je tijd al vooruit.
12:10 is not weird to think that "Meisje" is neuter, because as "-je" is actually a suffix for the diminutive, Just like "Chen" is the diminutive for german, the grammatical gender rule in both languages is: diminutives must ALWAYS be neuter. Meisje comes from Meid (Maid in english) and "je" is the diminutive. And the "s" I believe was added because in dutch, when you get an aspirated "t" or "d" followed by an "j" it does the same weird thing as english with aspirated "t" and "d" followed by a "y", like in "Got you" becoming "Gotcha". So yeah, "meisje" is just a "Little maid".
@10:49 I don't even think many native language speakers know this, but Dutch actually also makes use of postpositions. It's just that we are never taught this and we just instinctively do it correctly because we are of course native speakers. Dutch mostly uses preposistions, that is true, but some prepositions denoting a place can be used as postpositions when denoting a direction. E.g: Ik loop in de school. Which means ‘I'm walking in the school.’ Ik loop de school in. And this means ‘I'm walking into the school.’ Lastly I'd like to add that there is at least one postpostition (at least one that I could think of) that can't function as a preposition, that one being ‘tegemoet’. E.g: Wij lopen elkaar tegemoet. Meaning ‘We're walking towards each other.’ It can also only be used in such a reciprocal setting. A most direct translation of ‘tegemoet’ would probably be ‘towards each other’. @22:42 Intransitive verbs don't take ‘zijn‘ as the auxiliary verb in the perfect constructions. They simply take ‘hebben’. E.g: Ik heb geslapen. Meaning ‘I (have) slept.’ Gisteren heb ik op de tafel gestaan. Meaning ‘Yesterday I (have) stood on the table.’ Although I believe using perfect constructions in these sentences in English is incorrect. Reflexive verbs do indeed use ‘zijn’, as do verbs of motion. E.g: Ik ben naar de winkel gelopen. ‘I (have) walked to the store.’ Mijn broer is deze week naar oma gefietst. ‘My brother rode (has ridden) his bike to grandmother this week.‘
I have just discover this channel as a half dutchie which is i myself that did not consider it to be my fluent/native language. you just did a whole year of my dutch learning summary before i get to (not) use it irl because of covid. This is the best quality refresher i have ever seen.
From a Belgian: also in the present tense, gij really regularly adds -t to the root while jij has more exceptions. Notably jij bent vs. gij zijt but also it's always gij kunt, gij zult, gij wilt while for jij you also get these alternative, more common forms jij zal, jij kan and jij wil. Gij in oblique cases is u and in the definitive case is uw, leading Dutch people to think we are being polite when really we are using the most informal and amicable way of addressing someone (jij sounds more distant, posh and sometimes even condescending here). Because of this connotation, usage of gij is one of the most stubborn features that got retained from dialects as a result from the long and to an extent ongoing effort to impose the standard language (which is in practice equal to the language from Holland). Speaking about dialect, the reason why we still have more 'feeling' for masculine/feminine distinction is because in the influential Brabantian dialects male words take indefinite article 'ne and female words indefinite article een (not to confuse with German!). Neuter definitive adjectives without -e ending are a lot more common here, but when to use it is a bit vague (and partly depends on prosody?). Dutch is often a bit vague sorry. The word order as well where the v2 word order in main clauses/all verbs at the end in subordinate clauses is the most rigid rule, the 'German' order of putting the infiitives first in a subordinate clause is fine just somewhat less common and more formal sounding.
A simple rule to accommodate for the irregularities in the conjugation of 'gij' is to consider it a second person plural, where the plural -(e)n is replaced by -t. (This is identical to German.) Wij zullen, Gij zult. Wij zijn, gij zijt. The expected phonetical adaptations apply: wij mogen, gij moogt. For 99% of the verbs, there is no difference between the conjugation of 'gij' and 'jij'.
Luidste sounds like [lœytstə] with a T. In Dutch consonant clusters, everything turns voiceless except if there's a voiced stop at the end, then everything gets voiced.
One sound change I find very interesting in Dutch is the loss of final -e, since it's been going on for so incredibly long and is still ongoing. It's currently happening to a couple of words such as keuze/keus, leuze/leus, and einde/eind
R does liaison as well, its usually pronounces as a trill/tap instead of approximant in situations like "onder het" -> the h is dropped and r becomes a trill as if its in the onset
I find Flemish to be undervalued in the video, but I guess it makes sense because there isn't that much standardization nor a lot of written text just available online. (if you were to look in my DM's with fellow Flemish people, you'd see a lot of the spoken form transcribed, we do that a lot when chatting informally) Da gezegd zijnde vonneket toch nen toffe video. Merci om em te maken e
I find low saxon even more undervalued. Even though i (and others) consider the dutch low saxon dialects to be part of the low saxon language, and not the dutch language, many people still say they are dutch accents. So they shoudlve at least gotten a mention somewhere. Some interesting things are dropping the "e" in the suffix "-en", making the "n" syllabic. And mostly getting rid of the "ge-" suffix in verbs
@@Just_A_Baryonyx Very interesting, West-Flemish does something similar with en becoming n. What are some of these Low Saxon dialects called? Are they Dutch or Belgian, maybe German?
@@CouldBeMathijs they dialects such as Gronings, Drents, Tukkers, urks, etc. They are neither Dutch, nor German, but part of the more widespread low Saxon language, which also spreads into Germany. Unfortunately the low Saxon dialects have been influenced greatly by standard Dutch and standard german in their respective countries, and now often considered dialects of these languages. They are still associated with the lower class, kr with farmers, and there is some stigma around speaking low saxon
@@Just_A_Baryonyx Yeah I was talking about the countries not the languages, sorry. I agree that speaking dialects should be encouraged, in every language. The Antwèèrps my grandparents speak is amazing, and while I can imitate it fairly well, it doesn't come naturally. The dialect of the village I live in now has almost fully given way to something like a generic Brabatian with a lot of influence from Tussentaal. I hope the education system stops stigmatizing dialects so much, I once got a -1 on a Dutch presentation because I pronounced ei as a monophthong (like every Flemish speaker, including newsreaders do).
@@CouldBeMathijs oh that's very interesting, I've never heard of a monophthong ei. I do admit that I don't know enough about the Dutch dialects below the Rhine, and especially those across the border. Definitely something I'm gonna have to read up on
In some areas in Belgian Limburg the uvular tap or trill is also the 'default' (at least, how I am using it). It is sometimes quite confusing hearing dutch accents as the uvular 'g/ch' sounds in the north sound very similar to my 'r' sound.
One funny thing about adjectives in Dutch is that some words end with -en instead of -e when used as an adjactive, mostly resources. The golden tooth becomes “de gouden tand” instead of “de goude tand”, just like “hout” (wood), “wol” (wool), “brons” (bronze), etc. Although I do admit that especially in the Randstad where people usually drop the -n at the end of the word like you explained, these adjectives aren’t really noticeable when someone talks. I myself am from a village inside the Randstad, so everyone including me always said “goude”, but when I moved in with people from outside of the Randstad during uni, I noticed that most Dutch people outside of the Randstad still emphasize this -en sound. Another funny thing that is happening in the spoken form of Dutch is the usage of “dan” and “als” (both meaning than) being used interchangeably even though there is a “correct” way to use these. Likewise, in spoken Dutch, the possessive form of “zij” aka “hun” is starting to be used as the subject form by many people. However, both of these spoken Dutch quirks are looked down upon by many Dutch speakers, because people from lower socio-economic classes use these, thus gaining a negative connotation. Edit: I don’t look down upon these spoken form quirks by the way. It took some time for me, I admit that, but nowadays I barely notice it anymore.
Geweldige video! One more point which I didn't see brought up was the retraction of /z/ and /s/ in the vocal tract especially in the Netherlands. Kinda between an English 's' and 'sh' (or 'z' and 'dz' when voiced). Also there is occasionally schwa epenthesis in words like 'melk' [melek], 'film' [filem], and herfst [herefst] (although I believe the rhotic epenthesis is more common in dialects which use the tapped R in all positions instead of the Gooise R, but I could be wrong). Als leerling van Nederlands vind ik ook je uitspraak leuk. Hij (of zij, strikt genomen) is erg mooi 🙂
Also the accent aigu for focus stress is indeed used. you're most commonly gonna find it in books and creative writing, I think. the accent is placed on the vowel, also when the vowel sound is made up of letters that arent vowels, (eg: that was his idea, not mine!) Dat was zíjn idee, niet het mijne! (accent on the i vowel)
Randstad Dutch, and more specifically 'Poldernederlands', has actually widened the ui and ei/ij diphthongs slightly to account for eu and ee diphthongising (particular to the dialect of my hometown is the merging of eu and ui). On old television, I sometimes mishear ei as ee. I remember reading somewhere that these diphthongs came to Holland from Antwerp after the siege, but were considered vulgar and were repressed and closed more, but are now slowly re-widening in mainstream Hollandic. I always find it fascinating to hear the Antwerp dialect, because the vowels sound so similar to those of my hometown just north of Amsterdam, and because of a handful shared non-standard Low Franconian features (such as past tenses such as 'gebrocht' ('ebrocht' in my hometown) over 'gebracht', and inverted vowel qualities for long and short a) in those few instances where standard Dutch actually has a primarily Low Saxon feature.
Verbs with a separable particle (like toegeven) are always stressed on the particle. So it's TOE-ge-ven, not toe-GE-ven. Unseparable particles are never stressed (VOOR-komen → separable (ik kom voor); voor-KO-men (ik voorkóm) → not separable).
Great video covering our language! I did happen to notice @23:43 that the past participle of "eten" is not "geëten", but "gegeten". It did make me realise that that way of creating the passive participle is strange. As a Belgian myself I would also like to add that we also use the jij/je forms, but only in conversations with a medium level of formality, like talking to your teacher. In informal situations, like with friends and family, we use the gij/ge forms as described in the video and in very formal situations we will use the u form, as the subject. One last thing, @23:08, two other prefixes which replaces the ge- are her- and onder-, as in herhalen (to repeat) en herzien (to revise), and ondergaan (to undergo) and ondervinden (to experience). Just want give you big props for your pronunciation throughout the video, this is the best I have seen any non-native speaker do it on the internet!
I love learning about my native language through non-native speakers. it's only recently that I realised that ch and g is an allophone in the netherlands. (Im flemish belgian). great video, your pronounciation is great!
omg Nederlands zonder ‘t kofschip maar wel uitgelegd, deze vid heeft mij single handedly meer uitgelegd over het hele d t gebeuren dan al mijn Nederlands docenten combined
Vergeet 't kofschip, vervang het werkwoord door lopen en je hoort direct of er een t bij komt. Deze truc had mij 45 jaar geleden 30 lessen Nederlands en heel veel onvoldoendes bespaard.
Verb conjugation, I think an important verb you did not include for examples is a verb-stem ending in D, which would result in a 2nd person singular word ending in "dt" which imo is pretty weird. Eg. "jij houdt" (You hold). Many Dutch people get confused by this. Though the infamous "dt-fout" applies more to past tenses as seen at 20:50 because children/people are being taught silly mnemonics like "het kofschip" (The something ship, seriously, what the hell is a kof?), or "het fokschaap" (the breeding sheep (a sheep kept for the purpose of breeding, not a sheep currently engaged in such activity)), instead of just teaching them what voicing is.
A small note on the Imperative; when it is used, even as a singular word it is still considered a sentence. Thus the start requires a capital letter and it is often ended with an exclamation mark. Examples: "Help!", "Zit!", "Halt!", "Ga!"
I really like the video! But I would like to point out that though 'één' does indeed mean exactly one. Most people would just write 'een'. We only really use 'één' when we really want to stress that it’s 1 object. That’s why you’ll almost always see 'een' written. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen anyone write 'éénendertig', I’m not even sure if my Dutch teachers would allow that Second to last thing: like someone else already mentioned 'hij' does have a shortened form, that being 'ie'. So a sentence like 'because he didn’t want that' would by some speakers, I included, be said as 'omdat ie dat niet wil' Last thing: a lot of speakers wil drop the t sound and the end of the word 'niet' making it 'nie' [ni] Again great video and greeting from the Netherlands
Enjoyed the video, just some remarks about the pronoun section: 1. In some dialects in The Netherlands also use the 'gij/ge', but instead of 'gijlui' they would use from what I have heard in my province 'gullie' instead. 2. In standard Dutch the u pronoun is used in formal context that sometimes usses the 'vervoeging' from 'je' and other times from 'hij/zij'. For some context I live in the province of 'Noord Brabant' in The Netherlands. PS: keep up the good work.
You can sometimes figure out the whether a word is masculine or feminine by way of fossilised expressions using cases, but sometimes words have changed their gender over time and you get conflicting expressions, such as 'mettertijd' and 'tegelijkertijd' on the one hand, and 'des tijds' and 'ten tijde van' on the other
23:43 The passive participle of eten is gegeten ;) Thanks for making this video about our silly language Edit: Also at 28:11 that just looks like a fine sentence to me.
If spoken that sentence is fine, but I believe when written down there should be a comma after 'verwijderden' to signify the end of a subordonate sentence (bijzin): "Onze konijnen hebben het geld, sinds ze de dekking hebben verwijderd, niet bemerkt" I've written it here with an extra comma to signify also the start of the subordinate sentence, which is commonly done but not required
13:40 correction: While its true that you cannot say ‘de steen’s kleur’ (the stone’s colour), you don’t have to use ‘van’ (of), as in ‘de kleur van de steen’ (the colour of the stone). You can instead also say ‘de steen z’n (zijn) kleur’ (the stone its colour). It’s less common though.
Some quick notes about the north: The r, in the north it is usually pronounced retroflex /ɽ/ and some dialects are in the process of becoming non-rhotic, my dialect does not say coda r unless it is stressed. The /ʋ/ in the north is /w/ before rounded vowels. Word final /n/ does not dissappear for me, instead voiceless plosives become glottal stops and the n assimilates to the plosive: katten [kɑʔn̩], takken [t̠ɑʔŋ̩], apen [ʔɒʔm]. Voiced plosives are lost while the preceding vowel is sometimes lengthened and the n assimilates: hadden [ɑ(ː)n], hebben [ɛ(ː)m~əm]. Fricatives get voiced and the nasal either assimilates or is lost and /ə/ remains, in the newer generation this also goes for /ꭓ/ but not for older generations, /ꭓ/ is sometimes also lost cuz of this: bazen [bɒzn̩~bɒzə], kaffen [kɑvɱ̩~kɑvə], zagen [sɒʁɴ̩~sɒꭓɴ̩~sɒːn~sɒʁə~sɒꭓə]. After nasals its all lost and the nasal is geminated, except with /ŋ/: pannen [pɑnː], bomen [bomː], zingen [sɪŋnˠ]. After liquids the nasal remains after it: karren [kɑːn~kɑɽn] (I drop coda r), palen [pɑʟn] A lot of mistakes are made with which words need de or het throughout the entire country, but I think the north has it the worst. This is because in Gronings (a Low-german language) the distinction is lost because they became d' and t' which cliticizated onto the following noun, and then started to assimilate to that noun so that its d' joar "the year." Due to it being d' here a quite some northerners think it is de jaar in Dutch, but it is het jaar.
I live in the north and I've never met someone who had any issues with de and het. A more common thing you observe here (and I'm guilty of this too) is that we often use zijn instead of hebben for past perfect verbs that reflect the action to the speaker. You'll hear someone say "Ik ben een hamer nodig." Some other things you'll sometimes hear are these weird past tense verbs like hangen - hong or rennen - ron. Yes, I'm also guilty of sometimes using hong; I've never said ron tho, but my brother does.
@mistersir3020 Because the -t rule only applies to irregular verbs, and not even all of them. For tussentaal people use the standard conjugation with regular verbs, and in dialects, people use -ige(n). For example you can replace any regular verb with smurf to find how it is conjugated. In tussentaal people would say "Ge smurfte" as in standard Dutch, but in dialect you say "Ge smurfdige"
@@BramVanhooydonck Gaan is an irregular verb so I have no idea what you're talking about. Sure there is a simple past in -ige but that's going deep into dialects (not all of them).
@mistersir3020 Let me recap: I'm commenting on the observation that in Belgium the simple past tense follows the conjugation of the present tense. My comment says that the example given is not a great example. When you ask why, I explain that it is an irregular verb and that the observed rule only applies to specific irregular verbs. Regular verbs have a different conjugation altogether depending on whether the 'tussentaal' leans more to standard Dutch or it's dialects.
@@BramVanhooydonck Oh this makes it a lot clearer. However I never saw "the observation that in Belgium the simple past tense follows the conjugation of the present tense." in the video and this is also a laughable statement. All I saw in the video is that he said "irregular past tense verbs take a -t at the end for 'gij'." 21:25 which is correct, always.
I've been speaking Dutch my entire life and there were still a couple times in this video where you'd explain a certain weird structure and I had to pause and go "Oh wow, we really do do that!" Great video, man!
Love the video, great to see so much information so densely packed, and even for a native speaker it has some interesting insights (since you don't really think about a lot of stuff) :) However, I noticed the Dutch subtitles are incorrect pretty much the whole time. Maybe it was intended to be a kind of funny literal translation? Otherwise it might be worth it to have someone proofread :)
Another interesting thing about Dutch is that the verb for "to be", "zijn", has two infinitive forms: "zijn" and "wezen", of which "wezen" is required when used in conjunction with another infinitive: "ik ben wezen kijken" (I went to have a look).
28:12 Gemerkt or bemerkt are both fine, they mean essentially the same thing. It's also correct to put the verb on the end of the sentence, it's just not mandatory.
I'd rather use 'opgemerkt' instead of 'gemerkt' but that's probably personal preference. 'gemerkt' to me sounds more like 'marked' rather than 'noticed'
15:21 Zij also is the conjunctiv form of zijn (to be) which is pronounced exactly the same as zei (said) as long as you do not live alongside the german border.
1:13 calling the south of modern day Netherlands the southern Netherlands is confusing since the southern Netherlands is also a historic term referring to the provinces that did not separate from Spain in the 16th century, which for the most part is modern day Belgium.
13:11 i should point out that certain words like "wapen" weapon can also be pluralised with -en "wapenen" however -s is the favourite by far of most of those nouns
Good video! If I may, let me correct 15:12 "Gijlui / Ge" for 2p in plural is very rarely used... We normaly use "Jullie" in Belgium. Only the strongest dialect use those, like "Gaade gelle da doen" (= "Are you going to do that"), but then we mostly say "Gelle" and not 'Gijlui". I also wanted to say that I enjoyed the video and that a lot of native Dutch speakers could still learn from this!
Oh and, 15:55 "hen" and "hun" does have a difference. "Hen" is used for "Lijdend voorwerp" Like "Ik heb hen gezien" (= I saw them), it's also used for "meewerkend voorwerp" if there is also a preposition, like "Ik heb het boek aan hen gegeven" (= I gave the book to them"). "hun" is used for "meewerkend voorwerp" when there is no preposition, like "Ik heb hun het boek gegeven" (= I gave them the book"). I get why you're saying there isn't a difference, because fewer and fewer people know this difference. But there still is a difference
A real nice explanation, in pronom sector your lost some bits which are very common and of daily use. "He" will normally be transformed to "ie". Exemple " Hij wist niet wat "ie" zag. He did not realise what he saw. Her (female) will usually will pronounced as: Ik heb 'r niet gezien (I did not see her) or as a possive pronoun: Ze had d'r haar leuk gedaan. She make her hair look nicely. One interessant aspect I would like to add: No German nor a person of the Netherlands will ever be able to speak both German and Dutch both perfectly. Some of them get close but will always fail, as I do, Dutch and living in in Germany sine 1976. To many similarities and still different. Portuguees or Croat people can do far better.
At 19:16, the je in the plural category has to be a jullie. Funnily enough, je wensen can sorta be considered a valid slang sentence. It's a common mistake to change jou to je, and wensen is also a noun. So je wensen would then translate to 'your wishes.'
I believe that for longer definite neuter nouns (over two/three syllables maybe?) adjectives actually don't get the extra -e as you'd expect. I think people do often write it nowadays, but I noticed that in older texts (early 20th century) the -e often wasn't there for many neuter nouns, so I started paying attention, and I believe that people do in fact not say the -e. I'm not actually sure if it's the length of the word, or if there's something else going on. I think people would maybe understand 'het Portugees taaloverzicht' as the language overview about the Portuguese language, but 'het Portugese taaloverzicht' as a language overview which is Portuguese. Maybe it has to do with words that often go together, such as 'Europees Parlement'; I don't think anyone ever says 'het Europese Parlement'. It's funny that I speak Dutch every day, but when I start to consciously think about things, I become unsure. The same thing happened when I started noticing that different people may pronounce -tje differently depending on the preceding sound, but I'm not exactly sure when I pronounce it which way.
I hoped you would also cover some of the words we have in Dutch that doesn't have a word or a single word in English and the other way around. 27:14 and "warm" in Dutch just means "warm" in English for "hot" in English is "heet" in Dutch. Sometimes your accent was pretty good! Must've taken some time to learn.
the segment starting 10:28 is actually slightly incorrect, in a subordinate clause with an auxillary verb, the order of the action verb and auxillary verb are interchangeable. So while "Ik weet dat jij hebt gelogen" (I know you lied) is indeed correct like you stated in the video, the opposite order (mimicing German) of "Ik weet dat jij gelogen hebt" is ALSO correct, and carries the same meaning. This is just one example of word order being a lot "more free" than in other germanic languages. Another case of this is the word order OVS, most commonly used with pronouns that conjugate to their function. So the sentence "Hem mag ik niet" (lit. him like I not) or "Jou sla ik even over" (you skip I temporarily) are fully correct sentences written with the object in P1, the verb in P2, and the subject in P3. Note here that the meaning absolutely does not change, so "Hem mag ik niet" and "Ik mag hem niet" are both correct and mean the same thing. As if Dutch syntax wasn't confusing enought already ;) Also small addition on the imperative form of verbs, while nowadays the singular first person form is used for nearly all situations, in the past and thus still in formal speech/writing, for when talking (commanding) multiple people the singular second person form is used. So telling one person to sit would be "ga zitten" while telling more than one person to sit would be "gaat zitten". Like I said, this form isn't used in informal speech but in formal speech it still is, like a judge would tell the audience "gaat u allen zitten" (all of you, go sit down) - here accompanied by "allen", a formal version of "allemaal", which is also not really found in informal 'regular' speech. Finally, in the sentence at 28:10, "bemerken" isn't used in Dutch, at least not in Netherlands Dutch. It could be used in belgium, but it's not used in the Netherlands. Instead, we use "opmerken" with the past participle "opgemerkt" (op NOT replacing ge, as you explained). As for the verb not moving to the end of the entire sentence, including the subordinate clause; this is another case of word order in Dutch being flexible, as BOTH options are correct, except we would (optionally) use commas around the subordinate clause in written text or slight pauses in spoken text at the start and end of the subordinate clause. So in the sentence "I saw the man that walked to the store", both "Ik heb de man gezien die naar de winkel liep" and "Ik heb de man, die naar de winkel liep, gezien" are correct and can be used in regular conversation. Yay Dutch syntax, once again :) But most importantly: Amazing video, absolutely impressive. Your actual usage and especially pronunciation are far FAR above what you'd expect, really well done!
Great video as always, I've been looking forward to this one. It's always flattering to see someone take interest in one's language, especially if it's not one of the biggest, and your videos are always especially detailed. I don't want to be too rude or discouraging, but the Dutch in this video contains quite some (understandable) errors. The main thing that stands out is the word order (often you forget to use an inversion where one is required, and occasionally it's all yoda-like), and some grammatical constructions look distinctly English. You also use some words differently from what they actually mean. (For example, 'vals' usually means something like mean, evil, or deceitful, but can mean 'false' in fossilised expressions such as 'valse hoop'. 'Vals Nederlands' sounds like a Dutch with ill intent.) I have corrected/retranslated some of the first couple slides, so you can contrast and compare if you're interested in doing so: Een interessant onderdeel van het zijn van een taaltuber [or: van het taaltuber zijn], is dat ik de dynamiek van verschillende culturen kan zien, die over hun taal praten in mijn eigen commentaarsectie. En één ding valt zeker op aan Nederlandstaligen: ze vinden andere Nederlandse dialecten niet echt leuk. Mensen hebben gezegd dat ik dingen fout uitspreek, terwijl anderen me bedanken voor het correct uitspreken van diezelfde dingen. [The tenses still feel a little awkward in this sentence.] Één kerel zei zelfs dat ik 'Amsterdams' sprak, alsof het nepnederlands was. Dus ik loop hiermee al op eieren. Een ander ding dat mij opvalt, is dat mensen vaak bozer op mijn keuze in dialect [dialectkeuze] worden in de niet-taaloverzichten. Dit is waarschijnlijk omdat ik geen tijd heb [or: de tijd niet heb] om alle mogelijke dialecten te bespreken in video's die niet zodanig gefocust zijn. [The last part of this sentence I would probably phrase differently.] Maar vandaag zal ik over Nederlandse dialecten praten/spreken/vertellen [I would probably say: maar vandaag zal ik het over Nederlandse dialecten hebben; or: maar vandaag zal ik de Nederlandse dialecten bespreken], omdat deze video over niks/niets anders dan het Nederlands gaat. Bijvoorbeeld: Toen ik het Portugees/Portugese taaloverzicht maakte, klaagde niemand dat ik Braziliaans Portugees sprak. Maar toen ik de video over Romaanse klankverschuivingen maakte, hadden veel mensen er plotseling een probleem mee, grotendeels om pseudowetenschappelijke redenen zoals dat het 'fout' of 'niet de oorspronkelijke vorm' was. Het interessante aan het Oudfrankisch is dat, ondanks hoe bekend het is, het eigenlijk ongeattesteerd is. Als je Oudfrankische woorden opzoekt, zullen ze met een *asterisk/sterretje verschijnen. Hope you find it useful (if you're still interested in Dutch after making such a long and extensive video that is).
@@joriskbos1115 lol I will probably need to refresh my Dutch at some point, so this is very helpful, and yes, the sentence structure is definitely the part of Dutch I find the most confusing. Thanks!
In Flanders, there are still three word genders, with a clear distinction between masculine and feminine, mostly seen in the definite and indefinite articles, as well as adjectives. Although mistakes are sometimes creeping in, as the standard & written language sows confusion (all masculine words sound feminine in the standard language).
7:42 "But there are two of them..." "Hè? (means huh?)" I thought there were three ( `, ", ') side note: the trema on its own displays as a double quote, or rather, we use the same key on the keyboard so... 23:52 "gegeten", not "geëten" (from a quick google doublecheck, geëten seems to be Belgian, so fair enough)
In Flemish dialects, male and female nouns are still distinguished by the indefinite article. For example: the common way to say "a man" is "ne man" instead of "een man", and you can't say "ne vrouw" for "a woman", it needs to be "een vrouw".
Also, nobody in Belgium says "gijlui" as far as I know, it's always reduced and very regional. Some examples: gelle, gulle, gulder, gullie, gunder, gieder, ...
For your sentence with the rabbits: you CAN say "Onze konijnen hebben het geld, sinds ze het afdekzeil verwijderd hebben, niet opgemerkt", it's just a bit clunky and harder to understand. (I changed two words because "bemerkt" is a bit archaic, opgemerkt is better in this case, and I improvised something for "cover" since "dekking" only means that in the military sense, I assumed you meant a kind of tarp or something covering a pen)
Oh and about dialectal variation: we have a relatively large amount of differing vocabulary between north and south. Some examples: valies (BE) vs (reis)koffer (NL), gootsteen (NL) vs pom(p)bak (NL), and don't get me started on the differing words for walking/running/...
You should make an (equally long) video on the word "er" in Dutch. It can mean "there" as in "There are no people here" "Er zijn hier geen mensen", but als "that" as in "I have to take a look at that" "Ik moet ernaar kijken". And probably some other translations I can't think of right now. Sometimes it's even used twice in a sentence "Er zijn er nog drie" "There are 3 left" or "Er moet er nog een bij komen" "One more has to be added".
You claim in your video 2:10 you claim that only in Belium one differentiate between [x] nad [ɣ], this is incorrect. I'm a native Dutch speaker, living in the South of the Netherlands and literally everybody who grew up in this region differentiates between [x] and [ɣ]. We call it "de zachte G".
12:35 In western dialects the n is never pronounced. In eastern dialects, only the n is pronounced, and in between, there are different variasions. I use sutch a system as you describe (for every final n including masculin endings and with more complicated rules), but some regions do pronounce both both e and n.
About formal form: in standard dutch it is jij/je (informal) vs u (formal), in Flemish it's u (informal) vs gij/ge (formal). The fact that 'u' is informal in Flemish is often confusing for standard dutch speakers.
In mijn omgeving in Vlaanderen is gij/ge informeel en u juist formeel, als ze als onderwerp worden gebruikt weliswaar. Informeel en formeel is lijdend voorwerp allebei u en bezittelijke vorm allebei uw. Het verschil dat je beschrijft is waarschijnlijk regionaal, wat uiteraard nog steeds gewoon valid is.
Honestly with the Dutch word order, just assume the language is SOV and then move the conjugated verb to V2 position (or V1 for questions; only triggers in main clauses), and you're pretty much done.
As a German, it kind of makes me sad and worried at the same time. Even though we still have more of our case system left, the reduction of vowel qualities to schwa or loss of them in most unstressed syllables already wrecked havoc on the case system and verbal conjugation of many germanic languages, including german, and lead to the subsequent loss of the case system and conjugation patterns in many of them, indicating that german will undergo a similiar process in the future. I know that languages change all the time, and yet, it is so cool to still have some regular correspondences in flective morphology to other indo-european languages -the thought of losing them is not great :(
As a native Dutch speaker I now understand why I failed my final exam... damm you gave me some ptsd sometimes. I'll just stick to my local dialect. And you have quite good pronunciation for a foreigner. Especially the "ui" and "-sch" sounds.
Interesting how in the Randstad you pronounce the plural form of -en like -e, while in the Low Saxon parts of the Netherlands we pronounce it like -n instead of -en.
1:40 untrue. It is *not* the majority language in all overseas territories of the Netherlands, neither of the Kingdom nor of the Netherlands itself - Papiamentu is the majority language in Bonaire and English is the majority language in both Saba and Sint Eustatius. Those languages are also official regional languages, similarly to Frisian.
The U and Uw pronouns are still used in standard dutch but are used in a more formal way and ussually apply when you're speaking to an older person or someone of higher "rank" like your boss
There are cases ( including me but i heard one of my teachers do it too and many other people between 12 and 50 years old ) of randstad speakers voicing their hard g’s according to the same allophonic system as the soft g. Aka χ becoming ʁ In my accent /χ/ is pronounced [χ̞~ʀ̊] in coda position or after a short vowel ( aka written as ch ) And it’s pronounced [ʁ~ʁ̞] word initially and after long vowels And then there’s this one inconsistent allophone i use subconsciously ( i noticed most of the time i do it when im feeling extra confident ) anyway it goes like this Whenever [χt] is pronounced [ht~ʰt] ad long as there are no other consonants following ( cuz otherwise i would delete the t such as in achtbaan > achbaan ) For as far as i know im the only one who does this
Love all this stuff, but jeez fella, have you got a train to catch or something? I can hardly keep up with what you’re saying, and it’s all good stuff. SLOW DOWN! But thanks for the info anyway… A Brit living here in the Netherlands. PS - I learned the Dutch diphthong ‘ui’ as similar to the English ‘ow’ (as in ‘how now brown cow’) but with the beginning element as a flatter /æ/ rather than as /a/; in other words with less distance between the two elements. Sort of /æ>y/. Is that any good?
I couldn't understand his pronunciation of 'Gisteren verborg de muis een vork onder het gebouw'. And then I realised it must be still the pronunciation of the v and the ui, even though he did quite a good job. But the v and f aren't completely similar. They may be both voiceless in Western Dutch, but the v has a longer and softer air flow through the dentals and the lips than the f (pardon my lack of knowledge of the terminology). And 'muis' (mouse) could as well be understood as 'mus' (sparrow), 'mes' (knife) or even 'mis' ('miss' or 'mass'). I think that a native speaker would make naturally a bigger distinction between the pronunciation of these words to avoid any confusion, than a non-native speaker, by pronouncing in this case the 'ui' for longer.
Ok, apart from some generalisation (like zeeland being a lot more how belgium is described - in some cases - than the south of the netherlands - where it definitely is - or randstad and some other details missing) and incorrect translation of the on-screen text i only really have a problem with the rabbit sentence, you translated _since they removed the cover_ as _sinds ze de dekking verwijderden_. This seems incorrect, you should have used _sinds ze de dekking hebben verwijderd_. In this case you should use the _voltooid verleden tijd_, because otherwise it would be like English's _since they were removing the cover_. (yay werkwoordspelling)
small correction, Flemish using all the same singular pronouns as Dutch in addition to the their own ones and "gijlui" is indeed rarely used anymore, but it's corruptions "gelle" and "gulle" are still used in most dialects.
while it is true for the pronoun "ge" that you should add a t to past forms of the verb, it's rarely really done. Generally it's conjugated in a mix of old "ge" conjugation and that of "je/jij" is, the only difference being that ge is a more informal or familial pronoun to flemish people, je/jij is more polite or formal (standardised). Dutch people think "ge" is more polite than "je/jij", but to really be polite the pronouns "u" would be used, (which might be confusing because u is also a form of "ge" in some structures). another interesting thing: recently the pronouns die/hun/hen have started to be more used in a genderneutral alternative to she/him, much like they/them in english. it's still in its starting phase tho, and many find that it sounds off. I wonder how it will evolve. it could be a cool video to dive a little deeper into the distinctions of pronouns
I'm pretty sure you're the only native English speaking person I've ever heard pronouncing 'ui' correctly
it's pretty easy once you understand that "ui" is just "ij" but with rounded lips. And adding to that, "eu" is just "ee" with rounded lips.
True, but the g still needs some work. 😊
Native English speaker here too, but I speak Dutch and know a couple people who tried or are learning it, I’ve noticed they can’t get the r, neither the trill with the tongue or the one in the back of the throat, can’t really do the what’s it called, gooise r? They just all say it like the American r. They also pronounce the s like way too sharp? I don’t know if that makes sense but the Dutch s feels soft and warm and the American s feels sharp. They can’t get the w, it’s either like an American w or v, and never the Dutch one. They pronounce ee like ey, ij like eye, oo like ou, uu like oe? The hoer/huur mixup is hilarious, ui sounds like au. It’s like aside from the g, Dutch and American English are like almost the same pronunciation, but it’s like just barely different enough to make some important distinctions hard to tell apart
I hate Dutch, but I love your video
@@christianstainazfischer
I always think it’s funny that they keep messing up pretty much every vowel, while it can make a huge difference in what you’re actually trying to say (Najib with huursubsidie still is funny) 🤣 and pretty much every English speaking UA-camr annoys me with the ‘Goeda Cheese’ and ‘Stroepwaffels’ at some point 😑
And English is far from phonetic (I mean; Book, Blood, Door, Food, Cooperation, Brooch. How on earth should you know how to pronounce the ‘OO’ in those words? So compared to that, finding the correct Dutch pronunciation should be a piece of cake and could avoid a lot of misunderstandings 😂
Have you ever told people to try to gargle, to get where the sound comes from, to master the rolling R? That might help. 😊
One of my favourite lesser-known features of Dutch is the use of Modal Particles.
These are words like 'even', 'misschien', 'gewoon' and 'toch', which communicate a mutual emotion or understanding about what is being said.
It's a feature that can make translating sentences from Dutch rather tricky, because communicating this mutual understanding can lead to rather verbose sentences.
For example, when you say "Mag ik jouw pen even lenen?", the 'even' in the sentence implies that you only want to borrow the pen for a short period, and not for the full day.
Similarly, you can say "Ga gewoon naar bed" to someone who's complaining about being tired, where the 'gewoon' part implies that going to bed is the most logical option here.
These can also be combined, to create a whopper of a sentence like: "Luister nou toch eens gewoon". I think the best way to translate this would be something similar to "For the love of God, will you please listen for a moment?"
To break this down:
- Luister: means listen
- nou: indicates frustration
- toch: makes the frustration from 'nou' even bigger
- gewoon: it's in everyone's best interest that the person this is being said to listens to the speakers
- eens: indicates that the person needs to listen now, in this very moment
- even: indicates that the person only needs to listen for a little bit, not the entire day.
It's a feature that all Dutchies do natively, but never realise that it's it's own thing!
Most of the examples I've sourced from this website, it has some more in depth examples: zichtbaarnederlands.nl/nl/adverbium/modale_partikels
"juist", "wel" 👀
Can I borrow your pencil for a sec?
Just go to bed.
Just listen now anyway for once.
🔖
‘Just’.
As a Dutch person fluent in English, this is just... wow... I never realised. I just translate sentences naturally but I never do it word for word (because grammar, obviously). I dont even think about what I write, I just know its correct. (There are some words that need googling every time like "answer" and "wednesday" because who thought it would be a good idea to pronounce those in a differnt way than they're written.)
As a native Dutch person learning about the complexities in most of these rules for the first time, I'm pretty sure I actually don't know how to speak Dutch. I've just been lucky with repeating what sounds instinctually good to me 🙃
This is how language works for native speakers lmao
Dutch speaker here, mad respect for the honestly near perfect attempts at speaking and writing Dutch in parts of the video where you didn’t even really need to. With some of the large paragraphs I noticed a few small grammatical errors, and sometimes some of the words or phrasings used wete awkward or archaic, but overall this is by far the most successful Dutch writing and speaking I’ve ever heard like this from a non-native speaker. Very impressive! It’s so very clear how much effort and genuine care you put into making this video. As a linguistics enthusiast myself, this was an absolute joy to watch. Videos as in depth as these make me realise how blinded I have become by this sense of normality, in regards to how utterly ridiculous our silly little language can be at times.
Thanks!
7:52 Imagine someone saying "ik wil géén appels" ("I /don't/ want apples"). The accents make it clear the person really doesn't want apples, probably after having been insistently offered them.
Differs from, ík wil geen appels (it is I who doesn't want the apples)
Ik wíl geen appels (I don't want apples, but I do some other verb apples)
Ik wil geen áppels (I don't want apples, but I do want something else)
Of zoals we in Brabant zeggen:"Ik mot gene godverdomme appel jonguh"
I noticed 2 inacuracies in the video:
- at 23:47 the perfect tense of eten is gegeten. With a g in the middle and no trema. I think it is the only verb that does this as I cant come up with another example.
- at 27:49 the sentence doesnt really make a whole lot of sense in Dutch. Grammatically it is correct but the choice of words made me guess as to what the meaning was until I saw the English translation. For 'notice' a better translation is 'opmerken/opgemerkt'. I don't even know what bemerken really means😅. I think it is an old fashioned word that is not common anymore. But an even better word here would simply have been 'zien/gezien'. Just like English 'seen' would have fit. Opgemerkt would be a closer translation of noticed, but I guess 4/5 people would use gezien if they were to construct the Dutch sentence on their own without translating. And 'dekking' does mean cover, but only really in a battlefield context. As in to give cover (dekking geven/dekken), or take cover (dekking zoeken). In the sense of one object physically covering another one, there is the word 'bedekken' as a verb, but the noun 'bedekking' is way less widely applicable than 'cover'. In most cases, a Dutch person would name the specific object that is covering by its own name rather than refer to it by the general noun 'cover'. In this case, if the cover were a blanket, we would use 'deken' (which, now that I think of it, is itself derived from the verb 'dekken' which is kinda ironic. As is 'deksel' which means lid 🤔. But if it were a box we would say 'doos'). The verb 'verwijderen' would then also be changed accordingly to fit the blanket. For a blanket this would probably be to pull off or pull away, or 'eraf trekken' in Dutch (not to be confused with aftrekken which means to jerk off) and for deksel it would be 'eraf draaien', meaning to 'twist off'. And finally the word 'sinds' sounds a bit off, but idk why. Maybe it is more common in a historical context. Here I would have used 'nadat', which means after. But 'sinds' is stricly speaking correct. So a more natural sentence would be: "onze konijnen hebben het geld niet gezien nadat ze het deken eraf hebben getrokken" or "our rabbits haven't seen the money after they pulled off the blanket". I guess that in English it is way more common/natural to constrct a sentence using these general verbs and nouns like remove and cover. In Dutch, one would be more specific. It is kinda funny to me that I did understand the English sentence whilst not getting what the Dutch one was supposed to mean.
Otherwise it is a great video and really impressive to have been made by a non native speaker.
I think for “sinds” it has to with whether it’s describing cause and effect or time. Because “sinds” has more to do with time.
I.e. it would fit with “we haven’t seen him since May” (“we hebben hem sinds mei niet meer gezien”) but not “we haven’t been able to see him, since he moved” (“we hebben hem niet kunnen zien, omdat hij verhuist is”)
Basically - can you replace it with “after” or with “because”? If it’s “after” it would probably work, if it’s “because” probably not.
(And there’s probably differences for each region of the Netherlands too - I’m from the north-east and hear “sinds” said very often)
@@corinneeaglebridge zelf kom ik uit Meppel, dus dat moet niet heel erg verschillen in dialect dan 😅. Geen idee waarom, maar sinds klinkt hier toch een beetje verengelsd ofzo. Ik zou de zin zelf anders hebben opgebouwd denk ik.
As a native the most surprising factoid was the stress/klemtoon part. The rules for that never made sense to me, probably because it has never been properly taught to me as the instruction the teachers gave us amounted to "just figure it out lolol". You spent a whole grand total of 2 seconds on that, but I have learnt more from those 2 seconds than 18 years of formal education (at least on the subject of klemtonen).
My contribution to the 'add something interesting' prompt at the end:
The verbstem + ze conjugation. Eg. "werkze". "eetze". "loopze", and it means something like "good luck/have fun with working/eating/walking" ('Eetze' could be loosely translated as 'bon appetit'). Apparently this 'success imperative' is something exclusive to Dutch and it is mega weird.
Big fan of this "success imperative". Thanks!
i never interpreted ze as a conjugation. i see it as eet ze, like eat them. not eetze
@@sophiemeyer6718 but who or what is "ze"? This is why it is a weird construction
Sorry maar je "werkze, eetze en loopze" samentrekking is (nog) niet correct. Dit is een gebiedende wijs vorm. Eet ze! bij het voorschotelen van een stel boterhammen met kaas staat nou eenmaal netter dan "Eet de boterhammen!" maar de "ze" is contextueel en waarschijnlijk een verzachting van de gebiedende wijs. Volgens OnzeTaal/VanDale komt de stamze samenvoeging wel vaker voor tegenwoordig maar is nog niet officieel erkend; dus misschien ben jij je tijd al vooruit.
@@LotsOfSit's just an encouragement in imperative form. Like "go get 'em!"
Eindelijk, ik kan iets leren over mijn moedertaal
als je dit niet wist en je leeft in nederland/vlaamderings gebied dan weet ik het nietmeer
@@mattiarefe-ep5vu het was een grapje, het is gewoon leuk om zo'n video te zien over je eigen taal lol
12:10 is not weird to think that "Meisje" is neuter, because as "-je" is actually a suffix for the diminutive, Just like "Chen" is the diminutive for german, the grammatical gender rule in both languages is: diminutives must ALWAYS be neuter.
Meisje comes from Meid (Maid in english) and "je" is the diminutive. And the "s" I believe was added because in dutch, when you get an aspirated "t" or "d" followed by an "j" it does the same weird thing as english with aspirated "t" and "d" followed by a "y", like in "Got you" becoming "Gotcha". So yeah, "meisje" is just a "Little maid".
@10:49
I don't even think many native language speakers know this, but Dutch actually also makes use of postpositions. It's just that we are never taught this and we just instinctively do it correctly because we are of course native speakers.
Dutch mostly uses preposistions, that is true, but some prepositions denoting a place can be used as postpositions when denoting a direction.
E.g: Ik loop in de school. Which means ‘I'm walking in the school.’
Ik loop de school in. And this means ‘I'm walking into the school.’
Lastly I'd like to add that there is at least one postpostition (at least one that I could think of) that can't function as a preposition, that one being ‘tegemoet’.
E.g: Wij lopen elkaar tegemoet. Meaning ‘We're walking towards each other.’
It can also only be used in such a reciprocal setting. A most direct translation of ‘tegemoet’ would probably be ‘towards each other’.
@22:42
Intransitive verbs don't take ‘zijn‘ as the auxiliary verb in the perfect constructions. They simply take ‘hebben’.
E.g: Ik heb geslapen. Meaning ‘I (have) slept.’
Gisteren heb ik op de tafel gestaan. Meaning ‘Yesterday I (have) stood on the table.’ Although I believe using perfect constructions in these sentences in English is incorrect.
Reflexive verbs do indeed use ‘zijn’, as do verbs of motion.
E.g: Ik ben naar de winkel gelopen. ‘I (have) walked to the store.’
Mijn broer is deze week naar oma gefietst. ‘My brother rode (has ridden) his bike to grandmother this week.‘
I have just discover this channel as a half dutchie which is i myself that did not consider it to be my fluent/native language. you just did a whole year of my dutch learning summary before i get to (not) use it irl because of covid.
This is the best quality refresher i have ever seen.
From a Belgian: also in the present tense, gij really regularly adds -t to the root while jij has more exceptions. Notably jij bent vs. gij zijt but also it's always gij kunt, gij zult, gij wilt while for jij you also get these alternative, more common forms jij zal, jij kan and jij wil. Gij in oblique cases is u and in the definitive case is uw, leading Dutch people to think we are being polite when really we are using the most informal and amicable way of addressing someone (jij sounds more distant, posh and sometimes even condescending here). Because of this connotation, usage of gij is one of the most stubborn features that got retained from dialects as a result from the long and to an extent ongoing effort to impose the standard language (which is in practice equal to the language from Holland). Speaking about dialect, the reason why we still have more 'feeling' for masculine/feminine distinction is because in the influential Brabantian dialects male words take indefinite article 'ne and female words indefinite article een (not to confuse with German!). Neuter definitive adjectives without -e ending are a lot more common here, but when to use it is a bit vague (and partly depends on prosody?). Dutch is often a bit vague sorry. The word order as well where the v2 word order in main clauses/all verbs at the end in subordinate clauses is the most rigid rule, the 'German' order of putting the infiitives first in a subordinate clause is fine just somewhat less common and more formal sounding.
'Gij bent' is also used but only in the Antwerp dialect. It makes everyone else cringe.
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A simple rule to accommodate for the irregularities in the conjugation of 'gij' is to consider it a second person plural, where the plural -(e)n is replaced by -t. (This is identical to German.) Wij zullen, Gij zult. Wij zijn, gij zijt. The expected phonetical adaptations apply: wij mogen, gij moogt. For 99% of the verbs, there is no difference between the conjugation of 'gij' and 'jij'.
Luidste sounds like [lœytstə] with a T. In Dutch consonant clusters, everything turns voiceless except if there's a voiced stop at the end, then everything gets voiced.
One sound change I find very interesting in Dutch is the loss of final -e, since it's been going on for so incredibly long and is still ongoing. It's currently happening to a couple of words such as keuze/keus, leuze/leus, and einde/eind
OMG! You cant believe how happy l am to see this video! This is so incredible
R does liaison as well, its usually pronounces as a trill/tap instead of approximant in situations like "onder het" -> the h is dropped and r becomes a trill as if its in the onset
Thank you bro! This video has helped me to refresh my Dutch, since I was learning it a long time ago and I almost don't speak it in my everyday life.
I find Flemish to be undervalued in the video, but I guess it makes sense because there isn't that much standardization nor a lot of written text just available online. (if you were to look in my DM's with fellow Flemish people, you'd see a lot of the spoken form transcribed, we do that a lot when chatting informally)
Da gezegd zijnde vonneket toch nen toffe video. Merci om em te maken e
I find low saxon even more undervalued. Even though i (and others) consider the dutch low saxon dialects to be part of the low saxon language, and not the dutch language, many people still say they are dutch accents. So they shoudlve at least gotten a mention somewhere.
Some interesting things are dropping the "e" in the suffix "-en", making the "n" syllabic. And mostly getting rid of the "ge-" suffix in verbs
@@Just_A_Baryonyx Very interesting, West-Flemish does something similar with en becoming n. What are some of these Low Saxon dialects called? Are they Dutch or Belgian, maybe German?
@@CouldBeMathijs they dialects such as Gronings, Drents, Tukkers, urks, etc. They are neither Dutch, nor German, but part of the more widespread low Saxon language, which also spreads into Germany. Unfortunately the low Saxon dialects have been influenced greatly by standard Dutch and standard german in their respective countries, and now often considered dialects of these languages. They are still associated with the lower class, kr with farmers, and there is some stigma around speaking low saxon
@@Just_A_Baryonyx Yeah I was talking about the countries not the languages, sorry. I agree that speaking dialects should be encouraged, in every language. The Antwèèrps my grandparents speak is amazing, and while I can imitate it fairly well, it doesn't come naturally. The dialect of the village I live in now has almost fully given way to something like a generic Brabatian with a lot of influence from Tussentaal. I hope the education system stops stigmatizing dialects so much, I once got a -1 on a Dutch presentation because I pronounced ei as a monophthong (like every Flemish speaker, including newsreaders do).
@@CouldBeMathijs oh that's very interesting, I've never heard of a monophthong ei. I do admit that I don't know enough about the Dutch dialects below the Rhine, and especially those across the border. Definitely something I'm gonna have to read up on
Amazing that he dissected a complete language in just under half an hour!
I love the format of your language overviews, getting to see one on Japanese or Finnish would be awesome❣️
In some areas in Belgian Limburg the uvular tap or trill is also the 'default' (at least, how I am using it). It is sometimes quite confusing hearing dutch accents as the uvular 'g/ch' sounds in the north sound very similar to my 'r' sound.
One funny thing about adjectives in Dutch is that some words end with -en instead of -e when used as an adjactive, mostly resources. The golden tooth becomes “de gouden tand” instead of “de goude tand”, just like “hout” (wood), “wol” (wool), “brons” (bronze), etc. Although I do admit that especially in the Randstad where people usually drop the -n at the end of the word like you explained, these adjectives aren’t really noticeable when someone talks. I myself am from a village inside the Randstad, so everyone including me always said “goude”, but when I moved in with people from outside of the Randstad during uni, I noticed that most Dutch people outside of the Randstad still emphasize this -en sound.
Another funny thing that is happening in the spoken form of Dutch is the usage of “dan” and “als” (both meaning than) being used interchangeably even though there is a “correct” way to use these. Likewise, in spoken Dutch, the possessive form of “zij” aka “hun” is starting to be used as the subject form by many people. However, both of these spoken Dutch quirks are looked down upon by many Dutch speakers, because people from lower socio-economic classes use these, thus gaining a negative connotation.
Edit: I don’t look down upon these spoken form quirks by the way. It took some time for me, I admit that, but nowadays I barely notice it anymore.
Where I'm from, you might hear some old people use 'hullie' as a subject form (alongside 'sullie').
28:00 the translating of cover depends on it meaning:
provision = dekking
lid = deksel
wrapper = omslag
Geweldige video! One more point which I didn't see brought up was the retraction of /z/ and /s/ in the vocal tract especially in the Netherlands. Kinda between an English 's' and 'sh' (or 'z' and 'dz' when voiced).
Also there is occasionally schwa epenthesis in words like 'melk' [melek], 'film' [filem], and herfst [herefst] (although I believe the rhotic epenthesis is more common in dialects which use the tapped R in all positions instead of the Gooise R, but I could be wrong).
Als leerling van Nederlands vind ik ook je uitspraak leuk. Hij (of zij, strikt genomen) is erg mooi 🙂
Also the accent aigu for focus stress is indeed used. you're most commonly gonna find it in books and creative writing, I think. the accent is placed on the vowel, also when the vowel sound is made up of letters that arent vowels,
(eg: that was his idea, not mine!) Dat was zíjn idee, niet het mijne! (accent on the i vowel)
Randstad Dutch, and more specifically 'Poldernederlands', has actually widened the ui and ei/ij diphthongs slightly to account for eu and ee diphthongising (particular to the dialect of my hometown is the merging of eu and ui). On old television, I sometimes mishear ei as ee. I remember reading somewhere that these diphthongs came to Holland from Antwerp after the siege, but were considered vulgar and were repressed and closed more, but are now slowly re-widening in mainstream Hollandic. I always find it fascinating to hear the Antwerp dialect, because the vowels sound so similar to those of my hometown just north of Amsterdam, and because of a handful shared non-standard Low Franconian features (such as past tenses such as 'gebrocht' ('ebrocht' in my hometown) over 'gebracht', and inverted vowel qualities for long and short a) in those few instances where standard Dutch actually has a primarily Low Saxon feature.
Verbs with a separable particle (like toegeven) are always stressed on the particle. So it's TOE-ge-ven, not toe-GE-ven. Unseparable particles are never stressed (VOOR-komen → separable (ik kom voor); voor-KO-men (ik voorkóm) → not separable).
Great video covering our language! I did happen to notice @23:43 that the past participle of "eten" is not "geëten", but "gegeten". It did make me realise that that way of creating the passive participle is strange.
As a Belgian myself I would also like to add that we also use the jij/je forms, but only in conversations with a medium level of formality, like talking to your teacher. In informal situations, like with friends and family, we use the gij/ge forms as described in the video and in very formal situations we will use the u form, as the subject.
One last thing, @23:08, two other prefixes which replaces the ge- are her- and onder-, as in herhalen (to repeat) en herzien (to revise), and ondergaan (to undergo) and ondervinden (to experience).
Just want give you big props for your pronunciation throughout the video, this is the best I have seen any non-native speaker do it on the internet!
I love learning about my native language through non-native speakers. it's only recently that I realised that ch and g is an allophone in the netherlands. (Im flemish belgian). great video, your pronounciation is great!
In the southern Netherlands, the g and ch are also still differentiated.
omg Nederlands zonder ‘t kofschip maar wel uitgelegd, deze vid heeft mij single handedly meer uitgelegd over het hele d t gebeuren dan al mijn Nederlands docenten combined
@@riley0122 Voor vandaag had ik nooit over “‘t kofschip” gehoord 😅
Vergeet 't kofschip, vervang het werkwoord door lopen en je hoort direct of er een t bij komt. Deze truc had mij 45 jaar geleden 30 lessen Nederlands en heel veel onvoldoendes bespaard.
Verb conjugation, I think an important verb you did not include for examples is a verb-stem ending in D, which would result in a 2nd person singular word ending in "dt" which imo is pretty weird. Eg. "jij houdt" (You hold). Many Dutch people get confused by this.
Though the infamous "dt-fout" applies more to past tenses as seen at 20:50 because children/people are being taught silly mnemonics like "het kofschip" (The something ship, seriously, what the hell is a kof?), or "het fokschaap" (the breeding sheep (a sheep kept for the purpose of breeding, not a sheep currently engaged in such activity)), instead of just teaching them what voicing is.
A small note on the Imperative; when it is used, even as a singular word it is still considered a sentence. Thus the start requires a capital letter and it is often ended with an exclamation mark. Examples: "Help!", "Zit!", "Halt!", "Ga!"
I really like the video! But I would like to point out that though 'één' does indeed mean exactly one. Most people would just write 'een'. We only really use 'één' when we really want to stress that it’s 1 object. That’s why you’ll almost always see 'een' written. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen anyone write 'éénendertig', I’m not even sure if my Dutch teachers would allow that
Second to last thing: like someone else already mentioned 'hij' does have a shortened form, that being 'ie'. So a sentence like 'because he didn’t want that' would by some speakers, I included, be said as 'omdat ie dat niet wil'
Last thing: a lot of speakers wil drop the t sound and the end of the word 'niet' making it 'nie' [ni]
Again great video and greeting from the Netherlands
21:29 ng also counts as two consonants so any vowel before that will always be short which makes the i in ging ɪ in stead of i
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Enjoyed the video, just some remarks about the pronoun section: 1. In some dialects in The Netherlands also use the 'gij/ge', but instead of 'gijlui' they would use from what I have heard in my province 'gullie' instead. 2. In standard Dutch the u pronoun is used in formal context that sometimes usses the 'vervoeging' from 'je' and other times from 'hij/zij'. For some context I live in the province of 'Noord Brabant' in The Netherlands. PS: keep up the good work.
You can sometimes figure out the whether a word is masculine or feminine by way of fossilised expressions using cases, but sometimes words have changed their gender over time and you get conflicting expressions, such as 'mettertijd' and 'tegelijkertijd' on the one hand, and 'des tijds' and 'ten tijde van' on the other
23:43 The passive participle of eten is gegeten ;)
Thanks for making this video about our silly language
Edit: Also at 28:11 that just looks like a fine sentence to me.
If spoken that sentence is fine, but I believe when written down there should be a comma after 'verwijderden' to signify the end of a subordonate sentence (bijzin):
"Onze konijnen hebben het geld, sinds ze de dekking hebben verwijderd, niet bemerkt"
I've written it here with an extra comma to signify also the start of the subordinate sentence, which is commonly done but not required
13:40 correction: While its true that you cannot say ‘de steen’s kleur’ (the stone’s colour), you don’t have to use ‘van’ (of), as in ‘de kleur van de steen’ (the colour of the stone). You can instead also say ‘de steen z’n (zijn) kleur’ (the stone its colour). It’s less common though.
Some quick notes about the north:
The r, in the north it is usually pronounced retroflex /ɽ/ and some dialects are in the process of becoming non-rhotic, my dialect does not say coda r unless it is stressed.
The /ʋ/ in the north is /w/ before rounded vowels.
Word final /n/ does not dissappear for me, instead voiceless plosives become glottal stops and the n assimilates to the plosive: katten [kɑʔn̩], takken [t̠ɑʔŋ̩], apen [ʔɒʔm]. Voiced plosives are lost while the preceding vowel is sometimes lengthened and the n assimilates: hadden [ɑ(ː)n], hebben [ɛ(ː)m~əm]. Fricatives get voiced and the nasal either assimilates or is lost and /ə/ remains, in the newer generation this also goes for /ꭓ/ but not for older generations, /ꭓ/ is sometimes also lost cuz of this: bazen [bɒzn̩~bɒzə], kaffen [kɑvɱ̩~kɑvə], zagen [sɒʁɴ̩~sɒꭓɴ̩~sɒːn~sɒʁə~sɒꭓə]. After nasals its all lost and the nasal is geminated, except with /ŋ/: pannen [pɑnː], bomen [bomː], zingen [sɪŋnˠ]. After liquids the nasal remains after it: karren [kɑːn~kɑɽn] (I drop coda r), palen [pɑʟn]
A lot of mistakes are made with which words need de or het throughout the entire country, but I think the north has it the worst. This is because in Gronings (a Low-german language) the distinction is lost because they became d' and t' which cliticizated onto the following noun, and then started to assimilate to that noun so that its d' joar "the year." Due to it being d' here a quite some northerners think it is de jaar in Dutch, but it is het jaar.
I live in the north and I've never met someone who had any issues with de and het. A more common thing you observe here (and I'm guilty of this too) is that we often use zijn instead of hebben for past perfect verbs that reflect the action to the speaker. You'll hear someone say "Ik ben een hamer nodig." Some other things you'll sometimes hear are these weird past tense verbs like hangen - hong or rennen - ron. Yes, I'm also guilty of sometimes using hong; I've never said ron tho, but my brother does.
@boium. I'm not sure where in the north you live. I am from the far east, maybe that changes it? Also, I often say hong and ron XD
@@Hwelhos I live near the border of Groningen and Drenthe
"Ge gingt" wasn't a great choice as example for the past tense conjugation in Belgium.
why
@mistersir3020 Because the -t rule only applies to irregular verbs, and not even all of them. For tussentaal people use the standard conjugation with regular verbs, and in dialects, people use -ige(n). For example you can replace any regular verb with smurf to find how it is conjugated. In tussentaal people would say "Ge smurfte" as in standard Dutch, but in dialect you say "Ge smurfdige"
@@BramVanhooydonck Gaan is an irregular verb so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Sure there is a simple past in -ige but that's going deep into dialects (not all of them).
@mistersir3020 Let me recap: I'm commenting on the observation that in Belgium the simple past tense follows the conjugation of the present tense. My comment says that the example given is not a great example. When you ask why, I explain that it is an irregular verb and that the observed rule only applies to specific irregular verbs. Regular verbs have a different conjugation altogether depending on whether the 'tussentaal' leans more to standard Dutch or it's dialects.
@@BramVanhooydonck Oh this makes it a lot clearer.
However I never saw "the observation that in Belgium the simple past tense follows the conjugation of the present tense." in the video and this is also a laughable statement.
All I saw in the video is that he said "irregular past tense verbs take a -t at the end for 'gij'." 21:25 which is correct, always.
I've been speaking Dutch my entire life and there were still a couple times in this video where you'd explain a certain weird structure and I had to pause and go "Oh wow, we really do do that!"
Great video, man!
@@dutchmapping163 Thanks!
Love the video, great to see so much information so densely packed, and even for a native speaker it has some interesting insights (since you don't really think about a lot of stuff) :)
However, I noticed the Dutch subtitles are incorrect pretty much the whole time. Maybe it was intended to be a kind of funny literal translation? Otherwise it might be worth it to have someone proofread :)
Another interesting thing about Dutch is that the verb for "to be", "zijn", has two infinitive forms: "zijn" and "wezen", of which "wezen" is required when used in conjunction with another infinitive: "ik ben wezen kijken" (I went to have a look).
So what I'm hearing is that dutch is one word-final-shwa-loss away from losing half of its grammar
@@burnblast2774 Pretty much, ya
28:12 Gemerkt or bemerkt are both fine, they mean essentially the same thing.
It's also correct to put the verb on the end of the sentence, it's just not mandatory.
I'd rather use 'opgemerkt' instead of 'gemerkt' but that's probably personal preference. 'gemerkt' to me sounds more like 'marked' rather than 'noticed'
20:08 those verbs correspond to the modal verbs in german who also do that
And the ones in english who drop all endings
15:21 Zij also is the conjunctiv form of zijn (to be) which is pronounced exactly the same as zei (said) as long as you do not live alongside the german border.
1:13 calling the south of modern day Netherlands the southern Netherlands is confusing since the southern Netherlands is also a historic term referring to the provinces that did not separate from Spain in the 16th century, which for the most part is modern day Belgium.
You should've mentioned 't kofschip when talking about whether the present perfect ends with a d or a t, that's a classic.
xtc-koffieshop to be complete 😂
13:11 i should point out that certain words like "wapen" weapon can also be pluralised with -en "wapenen" however -s is the favourite by far of most of those nouns
Good video! If I may, let me correct 15:12 "Gijlui / Ge" for 2p in plural is very rarely used... We normaly use "Jullie" in Belgium. Only the strongest dialect use those, like "Gaade gelle da doen" (= "Are you going to do that"), but then we mostly say "Gelle" and not 'Gijlui". I also wanted to say that I enjoyed the video and that a lot of native Dutch speakers could still learn from this!
Oh and, 15:55 "hen" and "hun" does have a difference. "Hen" is used for "Lijdend voorwerp" Like "Ik heb hen gezien" (= I saw them), it's also used for "meewerkend voorwerp" if there is also a preposition, like "Ik heb het boek aan hen gegeven" (= I gave the book to them"). "hun" is used for "meewerkend voorwerp" when there is no preposition, like "Ik heb hun het boek gegeven" (= I gave them the book"). I get why you're saying there isn't a difference, because fewer and fewer people know this difference. But there still is a difference
24:27 If you adress someone with formal u, a -t should be added for the imperative.
A real nice explanation, in pronom sector your lost some bits which are very common and of daily use. "He" will normally be transformed to "ie". Exemple " Hij wist niet wat "ie" zag. He did not realise what he saw. Her (female) will usually will pronounced as: Ik heb 'r niet gezien (I did not see her) or as a possive pronoun: Ze had d'r haar leuk gedaan. She make her hair look nicely. One interessant aspect I would like to add: No German nor a person of the Netherlands will ever be able to speak both German and Dutch both perfectly. Some of them get close but will always fail, as I do, Dutch and living in in Germany sine 1976. To many similarities and still different. Portuguees or Croat people can do far better.
At 19:16, the je in the plural category has to be a jullie. Funnily enough, je wensen can sorta be considered a valid slang sentence. It's a common mistake to change jou to je, and wensen is also a noun. So je wensen would then translate to 'your wishes.'
I believe that for longer definite neuter nouns (over two/three syllables maybe?) adjectives actually don't get the extra -e as you'd expect. I think people do often write it nowadays, but I noticed that in older texts (early 20th century) the -e often wasn't there for many neuter nouns, so I started paying attention, and I believe that people do in fact not say the -e. I'm not actually sure if it's the length of the word, or if there's something else going on. I think people would maybe understand 'het Portugees taaloverzicht' as the language overview about the Portuguese language, but 'het Portugese taaloverzicht' as a language overview which is Portuguese. Maybe it has to do with words that often go together, such as 'Europees Parlement'; I don't think anyone ever says 'het Europese Parlement'. It's funny that I speak Dutch every day, but when I start to consciously think about things, I become unsure. The same thing happened when I started noticing that different people may pronounce -tje differently depending on the preceding sound, but I'm not exactly sure when I pronounce it which way.
Maybe it has to do with the adjectives ending on an s?
I think you may be right about the s. I've been racking my brain on what it could be, and I think you may have solved the mystery for me, thanks!
Also from what I hear the [eu] vowel is becoming a diphtong in the Randstad being pronounced more like /øY/
I hoped you would also cover some of the words we have in Dutch that doesn't have a word or a single word in English and the other way around.
27:14 and "warm" in Dutch just means "warm" in English for "hot" in English is "heet" in Dutch.
Sometimes your accent was pretty good! Must've taken some time to learn.
the segment starting 10:28 is actually slightly incorrect, in a subordinate clause with an auxillary verb, the order of the action verb and auxillary verb are interchangeable. So while "Ik weet dat jij hebt gelogen" (I know you lied) is indeed correct like you stated in the video, the opposite order (mimicing German) of "Ik weet dat jij gelogen hebt" is ALSO correct, and carries the same meaning. This is just one example of word order being a lot "more free" than in other germanic languages.
Another case of this is the word order OVS, most commonly used with pronouns that conjugate to their function. So the sentence "Hem mag ik niet" (lit. him like I not) or "Jou sla ik even over" (you skip I temporarily) are fully correct sentences written with the object in P1, the verb in P2, and the subject in P3. Note here that the meaning absolutely does not change, so "Hem mag ik niet" and "Ik mag hem niet" are both correct and mean the same thing. As if Dutch syntax wasn't confusing enought already ;)
Also small addition on the imperative form of verbs, while nowadays the singular first person form is used for nearly all situations, in the past and thus still in formal speech/writing, for when talking (commanding) multiple people the singular second person form is used. So telling one person to sit would be "ga zitten" while telling more than one person to sit would be "gaat zitten". Like I said, this form isn't used in informal speech but in formal speech it still is, like a judge would tell the audience "gaat u allen zitten" (all of you, go sit down) - here accompanied by "allen", a formal version of "allemaal", which is also not really found in informal 'regular' speech.
Finally, in the sentence at 28:10, "bemerken" isn't used in Dutch, at least not in Netherlands Dutch. It could be used in belgium, but it's not used in the Netherlands. Instead, we use "opmerken" with the past participle "opgemerkt" (op NOT replacing ge, as you explained). As for the verb not moving to the end of the entire sentence, including the subordinate clause; this is another case of word order in Dutch being flexible, as BOTH options are correct, except we would (optionally) use commas around the subordinate clause in written text or slight pauses in spoken text at the start and end of the subordinate clause. So in the sentence "I saw the man that walked to the store", both "Ik heb de man gezien die naar de winkel liep" and "Ik heb de man, die naar de winkel liep, gezien" are correct and can be used in regular conversation. Yay Dutch syntax, once again :)
But most importantly: Amazing video, absolutely impressive. Your actual usage and especially pronunciation are far FAR above what you'd expect, really well done!
Great video as always, I've been looking forward to this one. It's always flattering to see someone take interest in one's language, especially if it's not one of the biggest, and your videos are always especially detailed.
I don't want to be too rude or discouraging, but the Dutch in this video contains quite some (understandable) errors. The main thing that stands out is the word order (often you forget to use an inversion where one is required, and occasionally it's all yoda-like), and some grammatical constructions look distinctly English. You also use some words differently from what they actually mean. (For example, 'vals' usually means something like mean, evil, or deceitful, but can mean 'false' in fossilised expressions such as 'valse hoop'. 'Vals Nederlands' sounds like a Dutch with ill intent.) I have corrected/retranslated some of the first couple slides, so you can contrast and compare if you're interested in doing so:
Een interessant onderdeel van het zijn van een taaltuber [or: van het taaltuber zijn], is dat ik de dynamiek van verschillende culturen kan zien, die over hun taal praten in mijn eigen commentaarsectie. En één ding valt zeker op aan Nederlandstaligen: ze vinden andere Nederlandse dialecten niet echt leuk. Mensen hebben gezegd dat ik dingen fout uitspreek, terwijl anderen me bedanken voor het correct uitspreken van diezelfde dingen. [The tenses still feel a little awkward in this sentence.] Één kerel zei zelfs dat ik 'Amsterdams' sprak, alsof het nepnederlands was. Dus ik loop hiermee al op eieren.
Een ander ding dat mij opvalt, is dat mensen vaak bozer op mijn keuze in dialect [dialectkeuze] worden in de niet-taaloverzichten. Dit is waarschijnlijk omdat ik geen tijd heb [or: de tijd niet heb] om alle mogelijke dialecten te bespreken in video's die niet zodanig gefocust zijn. [The last part of this sentence I would probably phrase differently.] Maar vandaag zal ik over Nederlandse dialecten praten/spreken/vertellen [I would probably say: maar vandaag zal ik het over Nederlandse dialecten hebben; or: maar vandaag zal ik de Nederlandse dialecten bespreken], omdat deze video over niks/niets anders dan het Nederlands gaat.
Bijvoorbeeld: Toen ik het Portugees/Portugese taaloverzicht maakte, klaagde niemand dat ik Braziliaans Portugees sprak. Maar toen ik de video over Romaanse klankverschuivingen maakte, hadden veel mensen er plotseling een probleem mee, grotendeels om pseudowetenschappelijke redenen zoals dat het 'fout' of 'niet de oorspronkelijke vorm' was.
Het interessante aan het Oudfrankisch is dat, ondanks hoe bekend het is, het eigenlijk ongeattesteerd is. Als je Oudfrankische woorden opzoekt, zullen ze met een *asterisk/sterretje verschijnen.
Hope you find it useful (if you're still interested in Dutch after making such a long and extensive video that is).
@@joriskbos1115 lol I will probably need to refresh my Dutch at some point, so this is very helpful, and yes, the sentence structure is definitely the part of Dutch I find the most confusing. Thanks!
0:12 i’d say just ‘merken’ or ‘zich opvallen’ is a better translation for notice than opmerken hope you appreciate the feedback, love ya
In Flanders, there are still three word genders, with a clear distinction between masculine and feminine, mostly seen in the definite and indefinite articles, as well as adjectives. Although mistakes are sometimes creeping in, as the standard & written language sows confusion (all masculine words sound feminine in the standard language).
7:42 "But there are two of them..." "Hè? (means huh?)" I thought there were three ( `, ", ') side note: the trema on its own displays as a double quote, or rather, we use the same key on the keyboard so...
23:52 "gegeten", not "geëten" (from a quick google doublecheck, geëten seems to be Belgian, so fair enough)
In Flemish dialects, male and female nouns are still distinguished by the indefinite article. For example: the common way to say "a man" is "ne man" instead of "een man", and you can't say "ne vrouw" for "a woman", it needs to be "een vrouw".
Also, nobody in Belgium says "gijlui" as far as I know, it's always reduced and very regional. Some examples: gelle, gulle, gulder, gullie, gunder, gieder, ...
For your sentence with the rabbits: you CAN say "Onze konijnen hebben het geld, sinds ze het afdekzeil verwijderd hebben, niet opgemerkt", it's just a bit clunky and harder to understand.
(I changed two words because "bemerkt" is a bit archaic, opgemerkt is better in this case, and I improvised something for "cover" since "dekking" only means that in the military sense, I assumed you meant a kind of tarp or something covering a pen)
(Oh and you kind of need the commas in that altered sentence)
Oh and about dialectal variation: we have a relatively large amount of differing vocabulary between north and south. Some examples: valies (BE) vs (reis)koffer (NL), gootsteen (NL) vs pom(p)bak (NL), and don't get me started on the differing words for walking/running/...
I'm glad I chose quantum mechanics to study at uni
I’m of the opinion that Dutch isn’t actually svo, but sov with v2 restriction
I really wonder how it would be seeing you explain Turkish
You should make an (equally long) video on the word "er" in Dutch. It can mean "there" as in "There are no people here" "Er zijn hier geen mensen", but als "that" as in "I have to take a look at that" "Ik moet ernaar kijken". And probably some other translations I can't think of right now. Sometimes it's even used twice in a sentence "Er zijn er nog drie" "There are 3 left" or "Er moet er nog een bij komen" "One more has to be added".
15:04 actually i almost exclusively write them in texts or other informal stuff.
GEKOLONISEERD WOOOO :))) hoera I'm so excited for this
You claim in your video 2:10 you claim that only in Belium one differentiate between [x] nad [ɣ], this is incorrect. I'm a native Dutch speaker, living in the South of the Netherlands and literally everybody who grew up in this region differentiates between [x] and [ɣ]. We call it "de zachte G".
12:35 In western dialects the n is never pronounced. In eastern dialects, only the n is pronounced, and in between, there are different variasions. I use sutch a system as you describe (for every final n including masculin endings and with more complicated rules), but some regions do pronounce both both e and n.
About formal form: in standard dutch it is jij/je (informal) vs u (formal), in Flemish it's u (informal) vs gij/ge (formal). The fact that 'u' is informal in Flemish is often confusing for standard dutch speakers.
In mijn omgeving in Vlaanderen is gij/ge informeel en u juist formeel, als ze als onderwerp worden gebruikt weliswaar. Informeel en formeel is lijdend voorwerp allebei u en bezittelijke vorm allebei uw. Het verschil dat je beschrijft is waarschijnlijk regionaal, wat uiteraard nog steeds gewoon valid is.
No mention of one of its wildest features, circumpositions?
Honestly with the Dutch word order, just assume the language is SOV and then move the conjugated verb to V2 position (or V1 for questions; only triggers in main clauses), and you're pretty much done.
i like how Dutch is going thru the same changes middle English did, like losing its gender and cases
As a German, it kind of makes me sad and worried at the same time. Even though we still have more of our case system left, the reduction of vowel qualities to schwa or loss of them in most unstressed syllables already wrecked havoc on the case system and verbal conjugation of many germanic languages, including german, and lead to the subsequent loss of the case system and conjugation patterns in many of them, indicating that german will undergo a similiar process in the future. I know that languages change all the time, and yet, it is so cool to still have some regular correspondences in flective morphology to other indo-european languages -the thought of losing them is not great :(
Wel bedankt för de autgewerkte video! Eych wär waryg interesseyt to ziie än video öuver alle Friizishe deyalektens.
As a native Dutch speaker I now understand why I failed my final exam... damm you gave me some ptsd sometimes. I'll just stick to my local dialect.
And you have quite good pronunciation for a foreigner. Especially the "ui" and "-sch" sounds.
Also "Het Koninkrijk *der* Nederlanden" will always be there so keep using it.
I really like these in-depth videos... perhaps you could also make a romanian language overview >:)
Interesting how in the Randstad you pronounce the plural form of -en like -e, while in the Low Saxon parts of the Netherlands we pronounce it like -n instead of -en.
23:42 it's isn't geëten it's gegeten
1:40 untrue. It is *not* the majority language in all overseas territories of the Netherlands, neither of the Kingdom nor of the Netherlands itself - Papiamentu is the majority language in Bonaire and English is the majority language in both Saba and Sint Eustatius. Those languages are also official regional languages, similarly to Frisian.
For me Dutch looks like this: Eeooeeooeeooeeooeeooijijijijijijijijijijeeeeeeeooooo
*zeoooeeeeeeeeoeeooeoeijijijijijijijijijeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooouwnck
IJgachzje
Native Dutch speaker here. I can see that. We've got these long drawn out sounds and long words, despite being Germanic.
For me it looks like Zjnignjems Jijstel Ziyjengen
Dat klopt niet echt en ja ik praat nu nederlands om jouw juist te iriteren ookal boeit het je waarscheinelijk niet uit
Lil pronunciation tip
Use a voiceless laminal retracted alveolar fricative for s
Also just pronounce all your alveolars laminally
I'm dutch and i was like hold up slow down a bit there bucko
The U and Uw pronouns are still used in standard dutch but are used in a more formal way and ussually apply when you're speaking to an older person or someone of higher "rank" like your boss
There are cases ( including me but i heard one of my teachers do it too and many other people between 12 and 50 years old ) of randstad speakers voicing their hard g’s according to the same allophonic system as the soft g.
Aka χ becoming ʁ
In my accent
/χ/ is pronounced [χ̞~ʀ̊] in coda position or after a short vowel ( aka written as ch )
And it’s pronounced [ʁ~ʁ̞] word initially and after long vowels
And then there’s this one inconsistent allophone i use subconsciously ( i noticed most of the time i do it when im feeling extra confident )
anyway it goes like this
Whenever [χt] is pronounced [ht~ʰt] ad long as there are no other consonants following ( cuz otherwise i would delete the t such as in achtbaan > achbaan )
For as far as i know im the only one who does this
i love this guy
as a German myself, Yup, Swamp Germans
For me as a Dutch person this reminds me of those Dutch classes. Those were terrible to do especially when you messed up the grammar. 😂
Love all this stuff, but jeez fella, have you got a train to catch or something? I can hardly keep up with what you’re saying, and it’s all good stuff. SLOW DOWN!
But thanks for the info anyway…
A Brit living here in the Netherlands.
PS - I learned the Dutch diphthong ‘ui’ as similar to the English ‘ow’ (as in ‘how now brown cow’) but with the beginning element as a flatter /æ/ rather than as /a/; in other words with less distance between the two elements.
Sort of /æ>y/. Is that any good?
I couldn't understand his pronunciation of 'Gisteren verborg de muis een vork onder het gebouw'. And then I realised it must be still the pronunciation of the v and the ui, even though he did quite a good job. But the v and f aren't completely similar. They may be both voiceless in Western Dutch, but the v has a longer and softer air flow through the dentals and the lips than the f (pardon my lack of knowledge of the terminology). And 'muis' (mouse) could as well be understood as 'mus' (sparrow), 'mes' (knife) or even 'mis' ('miss' or 'mass'). I think that a native speaker would make naturally a bigger distinction between the pronunciation of these words to avoid any confusion, than a non-native speaker, by pronouncing in this case the 'ui' for longer.
Ok, apart from some generalisation (like zeeland being a lot more how belgium is described - in some cases - than the south of the netherlands - where it definitely is - or randstad and some other details missing) and incorrect translation of the on-screen text i only really have a problem with the rabbit sentence, you translated _since they removed the cover_ as _sinds ze de dekking verwijderden_. This seems incorrect, you should have used _sinds ze de dekking hebben verwijderd_. In this case you should use the _voltooid verleden tijd_, because otherwise it would be like English's _since they were removing the cover_. (yay werkwoordspelling)
weird translations like including -> omvatten or notice -> opmerken where they are words that would be correct translations in a different context
Can you please make a language overview about "Danish" it would be awesome
You definitely make me glad to be a native speaker, because fuck this 😂
Omg. It's just like afrikaans but the grammar is unnecessarily complicated and the phonology is cursed /s
small correction, Flemish using all the same singular pronouns as Dutch in addition to the their own ones and "gijlui" is indeed rarely used anymore, but it's corruptions "gelle" and "gulle" are still used in most dialects.
Also there are four different ways to pronounce the /r/ depending on region, some of which overlay, it is really interesting to look at.
Leuke video, geeft me beter inzicht in hoe het voor buitenlanders is om Nederlands te leren.
while it is true for the pronoun "ge" that you should add a t to past forms of the verb, it's rarely really done. Generally it's conjugated in a mix of old "ge" conjugation and that of "je/jij" is, the only difference being that ge is a more informal or familial pronoun to flemish people, je/jij is more polite or formal (standardised). Dutch people think "ge" is more polite than "je/jij", but to really be polite the pronouns "u" would be used, (which might be confusing because u is also a form of "ge" in some structures).
another interesting thing: recently the pronouns die/hun/hen have started to be more used in a genderneutral alternative to she/him, much like they/them in english. it's still in its starting phase tho, and many find that it sounds off. I wonder how it will evolve.
it could be a cool video to dive a little deeper into the distinctions of pronouns
BTW, I would say warm is more like the English warm than it's like "hot". Warm is a little, "heet" is a lot. Warm is warm, heet is hot