Dutch For Beginners

Here’s a picture of us pretending to be hard at work at “taal school” with our Dutch tutor Pieter Hoogvliet. We’re enjoying our time with Pieter and have learned, among other things…

Dutch vowels are called “klinkers” and sounds are called “klankers,” so klinkers make klankers.

Some Dutch words make more sense than English words. A verb is called a “werkwoord” and honestly that sheds more light on what verbs do than the word “verb.”

The Dutch word for spring is “lente,” which explains the name of that season of the church year.

We simply cannot pronounce the vowels “u” or “uu” or “eu” as they are supposed to be said. I take comfort in the fact that Dutch people can’t say “th” or “z.” They have words that use the letter Z but they pronounce it like an “S.” They can’t get their tongue up on their teeth to do th or z.

“Van” is the Dutch word for “of” or “from” and “de” is “the,” so:
Van de Molen means from the windmill
Van Putten means from the wells
Van Donker means from the dark
Van Buren means from the neighbors
While
De Vos means the fox, which explains Fox Motors in Grand Rapids
De Hoog means tall and
De Jong means exactly what you think it means.

The Dutch word for baseball is “honkbal.” I don’t know why.

Sometimes it’s really easy to speak Dutch – to say “the name is” you say “de naam is.”

But we get confused by these Dutch words because they mean something else in English:
Wil = want
Of = or
Rug = back
Hoe (pronounced “who”) = how
Burger = citizen (I was really excited about an “Amerkaan burger” until I learned this was a reference to me.)

The most fun is doing the guttural “g” which sounds like clearing your throat. I love to ask people if they’ve had enough to eat – genoug gegeten. Then there’s goedemorgen - you can spit all over people just saying hello.

Some people have wondered why we’re even bothering to learn Dutch, since you really can ask almost anyone here if they speak English and they’ll say yes. The answer is easy – all you have to do is go to the grocery store. We noticed some things had stickers on them that said “reclame.” We both thought it meant something like reclaimed and figured it was stuff past its expiration date and steered clear of it. Then we learned reclame means advertised. So, we were staying away from the things on sale. But that’s not the worst - one day soon after we’d arrived Gretchen picked up a package of lunch meat to put into our cart. It looked like roast beef, but I read the label and said, “I don’t think so.” The mystery meat was labeled “paardenrookvlees.” I knew that paard means horse, rook means smoke and vlees means meat. I later asked a Dutch friend if I was reading that correctly and she said sure, that she loves horse meat, it’s very light and very good if you are trying to lose weight. I first made a face and then said, “you’ve got a point, I would lose weight if you served me horse meat.” She said, “so what, you people eat deer and turkeys.” I didn’t grow up in a deer hunting family, so I’ve never had much venison, but I plead guilty on turkey. Gobble, gobble. I miss turkey. And hamburger buns. And yellow mustard. And Reeses. And ice. And Wendy’s. And Thousand Island dressing. Oh well, I comfort myself knowing I can get all the fresh eel and herring I want.

This week we were working on a bunch of sentences that were negations of a previous sentence that included possessive pronouns. So, if the first sentence was “Heir is je kantoor” (Here is your office) he would have us negate it and say “no, that is our office,” which is “nee hoor, dat is ons kantoor.” We did similar sentences with autos, calendars, cups of coffee, etc. Every sentence began with “nee hoor.” Nee is pronounced “nay” and hoor is pronounced … well, it’s pronounced “whore.” So with every sentence we were saying “nay whore, that is her car” or “nay whore, that is my coffee.” I felt like I was in junior high. It’s almost as bad as seeing speed bump signs in Sweden that say “farthinder.”