Tag: Dutch

Tips to Practice the Local Language where everybody speaks English

4 tips to practice a language as Swedish and Dutch, where most people are fluent in English and foreigners struggle to improve the local language.

You are learning a language and would be eager to use it when you are in the country where it is spoken. But what if everybody switches to English the second they hear you are not from there?

This is a typical problem in Holland and Scandinavia, where most people speak English well, and the fact that English will simply always work better and be the easiest option prevents you from attempting at speaking anything else.

I have had experiences with Dutch, Swedes, Swedes and Norwegians in various contexts and with the given language being at various levels at different times, and these are a few tips to exercise the language if you are not (or do not feel) fluent yet:

1. important information in English, smalltalk and chitchat in local language

Sometimes you just have to be sure you know what is going on and what you need to do, other times you can miss some parts of a dialogue without causing yourself any damage – in the latter give a go at your target language, you’ll never understand 100% anyway if you never practice.

example: Last time I was in Denmark, I heard a confusing announcement on the train. As i wanted to be 100% sure my train would reach my destination, I first asked that in English to the person sitting next to me, to switch to Danish right after having received that piece of information, (saying that I actually did speak Danish) and had a nice conversation in it.

If your level is still basic, do make sure to (be able to) say small things like hi/thanks/sorry/excuse me/good evening etc. You’ll get those small expression stuck in your head, and give yourself and others the feeling you do speak the language, which is a better start than not using it at all.

3. Prepare what you want to say in advance, or fake it until you make it.

Sometimes you can look up how to properly say something in advance, as in shops and restaurants – things like ‘do you have a free table’ ‘i would like to this and that’, or even look up some extra vocabulary for a conversation of which you already know the topic.

Also: in given contexts like shops the things you get asked tend to be standard, as ‘do you want a bag?/receipt..’ , so you know what words might be pronounced, anticipating what you’ll be asked, and be less scared you will not understand.

example: I had to talk to a Norwegian client on the phone, so I wrote down what I would say, and looked up vocabulary I needed: that means learning new words and getting to practice with them!

3. Find ‘comfort zones’ and people with whom you stick to the language

If your level in a language is not very high, you might not dare making attempts with strangers. I am a quite shy person myself, other than a perfectionist, so I know that feeling well. But you learn a language by practicing it (and making mistakes), and as soon as you have someone or somewhere to freely practice -no matter how off your grammar is, how many gaps you have in your vocabulary, how many times you ask for repetitions – do it. Having active conversations is also important to absorb the language yourself and learn from your language partner.

With strangers you can stick to English if you feel uncomfortable otherwise, but it is good to have a situation in which you’ll always stick to the language (This counts also when chatting online!). Or at least often enough that your default language is Swedish, Finnish, etc. You learn to swim by swimming – but it does not have to be in the open sea from moment one.

Other options if you do not know anybody, you can use find tandem partners on apps such as hellotalk, tandem etc. and give yourself the rule to rather use translators, but never use English. Events as language cafés are also great occasions to practice if you find any!

keypoint: sometimes it is a matter of self-confidence more than language level

The thing with Swedish, Dutch, Danish etc. is, you might be pretty good at them, but if you are a bit insecure, allowing yourself to use them language over English will be hard. In countries where the average level of English is poor, that is of course completely different.

So you’ll just exercise your Italian, Japanese, Spanish, etc. without thinking much about whether you are good enough at it. You might barely know how to order a drink in Italian or Japanese, but still, you’ll do it, because they will understand it better than in English, even with bad pronunciation or grammar. Maybe they will be relieved they can use their language with you, while the Dutch either want to help you by using a language you are more fluent in or just want to have a smooth communication.

It does take some self-confidence to stick to a language if the counterpart easily switches to English! Even if it does not necessarily mean you are bad at it. It is all about finding contexts and people to use the language, broadening them gradually as you get more comfortable or fluent enough to use it for everything.

How I have done it: First I would use Dutch only in written form and with given people, then I got to the point I’d dare using it with strangers, in shops, but not at an airport desk, then I started using it even for formal things like registering at the municipality , but I did not switch back to Dutch if people switched to English. Now i stick to Dutch, always. With Danish I am in the phase where I could use it in formal context but do not always dare due to fear of not understanding. But I did ask for information in Danish at a museum desk, which I did not do one year ago.

7 fun facts about Lucia, Sweden’s pagan saint

Lucia brings light in the darkest night of the year and is a mix of pagan and christian traditions. It is celebrated in Scandinavia with processions, saffron buns and church concerts.

Chiara's avatar by Chiara

How I learn all Germanic languages: tips and insights

What I’ve learned through my language learning journey trying to master many Germanic languages, from German to Faroese through Dutch and Swedish among others.

This article is derived from my Instagram post on my language learning profile inspired by @haluska.langs with her slavic version. I had also made a post about learning multiple similar languages in the past!

I speak to different degrees most of the main Germanic languages, including being familiar with a few lesser known ones as West-Frisian and Faroese.

I gradually added more and more of them through the years, starting from English and then German at school, then self studying more since I was about to finish high school.

As English was heavily influenced by French and uses many words with latin roots, besides the fact that it just feels like a given-for-granted language everybody speaks, it sometimes feels weird to include it in the Germanic languages family, but it indeed helped understanding for example to instantly recognize är in Swedish as the verb are, and the fact that verbs have att – in the infinitive form makes sense as English has to –.

However, When i started Swedish and Dutch simultaneosly in the now distant April 2017, it was German that made a lot of things easier than it would have perhaps been without it.

MY JOURNEY

  • I started English in primary school, and was always quite excited about learning it, wishing to have more hours for it every year.
  • My second Germanic language arrived much later, I choose German over Spanish in high school, but it had been fascinating me for many years, trying to learn random words of it here and there, I did learn the first word on cornflake boxes: Zutaten (“ingredients”).
  • During my last year of high school, after 5 years of English, French and German, I started self-learning Swedish and Dutch simultaneosly, using exclusively Duolingo for months. I theorically dowloaded duolingo for Swedish, but I loved Dutch too so i immediately started the course and used duolingo basically every day for a good year. I had a strong knowledge of German to begin with, it heavily helped me and made a lot of grammar and vocabulary instantly clear/recognizable, but also meant having interferences (see below), for example it ruled the verb order making me place verbs where it made no sense in Swedish nor English nor my mother tongue…
    • Two years later I wanted to learn some Danish and Norwegian: exposure, writing “adjusting” my Swedish with the help of online translators, but the effort to learn grammar and vocabulary was 70% done. learning Danish and Norwegian together without knowing Swedish would have been bad, you wouldn’t know when you are learning one or the other, but with a good Swedish knowledge and some exposure for both it’s manageable. Needless to say, focusing on one will make you better at it than splitting time/energies for both.
  • During the first corona lockdown in spring 2020, I started learning Icelandic with textbooks and online resources. I had actually read about pronunciation in a mountain hut in summer 2018, but didn’t understand much or took the time to process it at haha.
  • In the last few years I’ve been also getting some exposure to Faroese and West Frisian (which i can understand to a given extent thanks to other languages as Dutch and Icelandic) and casually learning them.

MIXING THEM UP

When learning multiple related languages, it is easy to end up mixing them up in one way or another. The more fluent you are in one, the less it is likely that you let yourself get influenced by another, this is way reaching a good level in onee language before learning another one in the same family is important. Moreover, you will be very familiar with much of its grammar and vocabulary, and you might rely way too much on your first language of that family. Using Spanish words when speaking Italian might not be the best, but you’ll be much better off than only knowing more distant related languages locals hardly speak.

There are a lot of false friends and words which would “fit” in the other language used without even realizing it. Some examples are short words existing in multiple languages but with different usage/meaning:

  • en means “and” in Dutch, “a(n)” in Scandinavian languages, and “but” in Icelandic!
  • om means “about” something in Scandinavian languages, while it’s usually “(in order) to” in Dutch
  • A false friend example is Icelandic að kenna meaning teach; while kennen/känna/kjenne/kende all mean “know (usually someone)”!
  • a funny fact about interferences is that I once used mensen talking in Swedish, “people” in Dutch, but “the menstruation” in Swedish!

Verb order is very vulnerable to interferences when learning multiple Germanic languages, at least at first: with subordinate clauses in German you have “..that I something done have“, in Dutch “..that I something have done“, in North Germanic languages ” ..that I have done something” as it is in English.

At first I would instantly use the German verb order with Swedish (for no apparent reason since the order in Swedish is supposed to be the most natural for me..), that doesn’t happen anymore, however, I still mess up it with Dutch and German since they only have the very last part switched! I hate it, but that’s what you pay for speaking both I guess…

To avoid interferences one of the most useful things is getting corrected or being aware of them, detecting the mistake is the first step to stop making it.

BONUS POINTS

Easy to learn vocabulary

Knowing languages related to each other can cause interferences but can also come very handy at times! Besides all words sharing a common root, You will understand and easily remember cognates and words which are everyday vocabulary in one language and seldom used ones in another one.

  • In Danish jeg spiser is “I eat”, you might easily remember this word as Speisekarte means “menu” in German. In the closely related Swedish you say “jag äter”, which however resembles eat, eten etc.
  • Despite my Swedish being more advanced, Danish and Norwegian helped me with understanding right away obsolete words in Swedish while reading an old book: Danish pige and Norwegian jente are the word for “girl”, while piga/jänta are “maid” in Swedish, not a word you’d learn in an everyday context.

Easy to guess the gender

Germanic languages, except for English, have different genders, whether masculine, feminine, neuter as German, Icelandic, and partially Norwegian, or general + neutral as Swedish, Danish and Dutch*. Being from the same family in many cases genders are usually the same for words with the same root:

  • House is neutral: das Haus/het huis/ett hus/husið;
  • Earth is feminine, sky is masculine: die Erde, der Himmel (German) /jörðin, himinn (Icelandic) /jorda, himmelen (Norwegian)

The closer the language the safest the bet: Dutch and German are more likely to have words with the same gender than them and North Germanic languages: book is neutral in West Germanic languages but feminine/general in North Germanic – het boek, das Buch (n) / boka, bókin (f).

*Neutral exists in all but English, while In Dutch, Swedish and Danish masculine & feminine merged. However, they are sometimes still visible, for example in pronouns for objects: hij/zij as he/she in Dutch (knowing German can give you great advantage compared to natives!); to tell the time in Swedish you say “hon är..” (she is..) because klocka (clock) was feminine! Norwegian does have feminine, even though in some Norwegian dialects feminine (book: ei bok, boka) and masculine are not distinct and general en is used (having en bok, boken which would be masculine).

Easy to learn Irregular verbs

All Germanic languages have irregular verbs, which mean learning lists of paradigms present-past perfect-past participle. Once you have learned them for one, it’s all downhill to learn the others, as not only you already know how the verb system works but many are very similar across different languages (and the set of verbs being irregular is more or less the same), or follow similar patterns:

  • ate=aß/at/åt; saw=sah/zag/så(g)/sá
  • drink-drank-drunk: drinken-dronk-gedronken/ trinken-trank-getrunken/ dricka-drack-druckit

Method

Don’t learn more than 2 similar languages at once, if very similar and from scratch keep that at one. You might be dying for the other for a while, but the path will be downhill and you’ll be less confused.

I learned Norwegian and Danish more or less simultaneously but it wad 95% just exposure, as I already spoke Swedish. That means I knew well what I was dealing with and most importantly I didn’t have to learn a grammar system from zero, but mostly only how to adapt it to Danish and Norwegian, same for how spelling behaves in both. The proficiency you acquire then depends on how much time you spend on each. My Danish is better and I don’t have to check words as much as in Norwegian because I happened to use Danish more because of friends and such, but I used to write letters in Danish/Norwegian and basically check every other word on google, while the grammar structure was as good as done with some exposure on top of speaking Swedish.

Getting a little exposure is always fine, you will just get to know the other languages a bit more, preparing yourself for a more serious approach when you are ready. With some effort you’ll then split from the “rely on X language” phase and speak it independently.

Dutch and German are maybe almost as similar as Scandinavian languages to each other, but not as much, and if you learned Dutch first you’ll have to deal with cases and an additional gender, not quite the same as just adapting it and only learning from immersion.

Nevertheless, give love to all your target languages through frequent immersion, scheduling study sessions for those which require help.

A little fact in conclusion: in Germanic languages “moon” is masculine and “sun” is feminine, while in romance languages it is the opposite! I can see why if you look at the weather and daytime in North vs South Europe 🙂

Nordic findings in japan

Nordic culture experienced in Japan: Moomins, Dala horse stationery, Nordic-inspired foods and books about Scandinavia seen by the Japanese.

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How Nordic are Baltic countries

Are Baltic countries Nordic at all? I explored Latvia and Estonia, noting their ties to Nordic culture, from languages to Rye bread and Midsummer.

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Swedish and Dutch: language comparison

Swedish and Dutch languages compared: speakers, grammar, vocabulary, history

Both Swedish and Dutch belong to the Germanic language family: Dutch is a West Germanic language, as German and English; while Swedish is North Germanic, learn to tell it apart from all the other Nordic languages. They are therefore closely related, but of course not as close as Scandinavian languages to each other.

They are not well known languages worldwide and for this reason i decided to use them in a infographic comparison assignment! You can see it better here.

Countries and number of speakers

  • Dutch is mainly spoken in the Netherlands, with 17 millions of speakers.
  • In Belgium, it is spoken by 54% of the population, in Flanders. That makes up for 6,5 millions of speakers.
  • You might be surprised to see South America on the map, that’s because Dutch is also an official language in Suriname, a former colony, and on small Caribbean islands: Curaçao, Aruba, Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
  • It used to be spoken or is on the verge of extinction in the area around Duinkerk, northern France; and Indonesia.
  • Afrikaans is considered a daughter language of Dutch and is spoken by 17 million people in South Africa in Namibia, of which 7 millions speak it as their mother tongue.
  • Swedish is spoken in Sweden (9 million speakers) and by Swedish minorities in Finland, mostly concentrated in the south and west coastal regions and the autonomous Swedish-speaking archipelago Åland. Swedish Finns are around 290,000. 3 municipalities in mainland Finland have Swedish as the sole official language.
  • There used to be a Swedish-speaking minority in Estonia From the 13th to 20th century, particularly on the islands; but almost all Swedish Estonians fled to Sweden during World War II. Only around 300 of them remain.
  • In the early 18th century Estonia was ceded to the Russian Empire and around 1,000 Swedish Estonians were forced to move to Ukraine, to a village now called Gammalsvenskby, (“Old Swedish Village”). A few elderly people in the village still speak a Swedish dialect, most likely facing extinction.

Finding precise and correct data about the learners of these languages was quite hard, not considering people who self-study the language (I would fall under this category).

I tried to find data about students enrolled in language courses, finding numbers of those who study Dutch as a school subject: In Belgium, not surprising considering it is a national language, it is studied in Wallonia (French-speaking area) by about 300,000 people. Dutch can be found in German schools in areas sharing a border with the Netherlands: Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen. A small portion of France in the very north of the country, Pas-de-Calais used to be Dutch-speaking, the language is still taught to some 20,000 pupils.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find data about Universities offering Dutch courses and the number of students over the world, but i thought it was relevant to add that in Indonesia around 30,000 students take Dutch courses in college. Because of its colonial past as part of the Dutch Indies, Dutch still plays a role in Indonesian history and its law, making it important for the students to have some knowledge of the language and its vocabulary in some fields.

Swedish is not really a school subject anywhere but in Finland, where it is a compulsory subject for everybody. This is because of the significant Swedish influence on Finland and the fact that Finland used to be part of the Swedish Empire. According to the sources I found, people reported to be able to speak Swedish are around 2 millions in Finland. I found that there are about 40,000 people being enrolled in Swedish language courses worldwide.

What are the languages like?

Swedish has three extra letters: Å, Ä, Ö, placed at the end of its alphabet, longer than the Dutch alphabet which includes 26 letters and not any more than in the English one. Despite this, Dutch does consider IJ as a single letter producing a single sound and you can find it written as Y in old texts and it still is in Afrikaans, Dutch daughter language. (Try writing I and J in italic and you’ll see they look like Y together!). I and J are written in capital letters when IJ is at the beginning of a word: IJsland is Iceland.

Both Dutch and Swedish alphabets include letters that are only used in foreign words: Q can be found in some Swedish surnames as -quist, written in a fancy way when latinising names was fashionable. W and Z appear only in foreign words in Swedish, but it is a very common letter in Dutch. X is not present in Dutch, and not much more in Swedish, but it is still found in a few words as exempel.

Since they both belong to the Germanic language family, Swedish and Dutch have many similarities in vocabulary, often shared with English as well. You can notice them in the table I made.

Both Swedish and Dutch have two genders: old masculine and feminine ended up being merged in a single, general gender; which exists with a neutrum gender:

  • in Dutch de is the general article het “the” is the neutrum article, both take een “a(n)” in the indefinite form though. En kvinna, ett hus become kvinnan, huset if you want to say “the woman, the house”.
  • In swedish en and ett are respectively the general and the neutrum indefinite articles. In the Scandinavian definite forms the article goes to the end of the word:

This unfortunately does not mean that all living things take the general article and objects the neutrum article: there are some rules for endings and categories of words but you cannot guess the gender in a nature-logical way. Child is neutrum in both languages: het kind, ett barn; and girl is paradoxically netrum in Dutch: het meisje (as weird as it might sound, there are reasons for this I will explain if anyone wishes me to).

Swedish verbs always take the same conjugation in all persons: -(a/e)r for present tense. Dutch verb declension is slightly more complicated, but not as much as other languages. You might say it is a simplified version of German (which is honestly what the Dutch language is as a whole..).

Dutch plurals are either -en or -s, while Swedish tends to often take -r but with different vowels preceding it: words ending in -a take -or, in -e take -ar and if it doesn’t have a vowel ending in the singular form it can take -er but not necessarily. There are also words that change their root vowel and/or add up -er: as man/men in English we have en man/män in Swedish, or en bok/böcker (books). While many neutrum words usually stay the same in the plural form, there are cases as ett land/länder (countries).

Loanwords to and from Dutch and Swedish

loanwords from other languages in Swedish and Dutch

Swedish has a visibly large amount of words with their origin in German, due to the time of the rise of the Hanseatic League in the 13th and 14th century, providing Swedish Commerce and administration with a large number of Low German-speaking immigrants. Many loanwords are about trade and town life, such as stad (from Stadt, city), köpman (from Kaufmann, businessman), borgmästare (from Borgermester, mayor) och betala (from betalen , to pay).

Latin and Greek have a significant number of loanwords in Swedish and Dutch just like in most European languages. This goes for many science-related terms, although some terms were substituted with pure-Dutch terms in some fields: Physics and Mathematics are called Natuurkunde and Wiskunde (“nature-science”, “knowledge-science”, verb and vowel are werkwoord and klinker (“work-word”, “sounder”). Swedish has adopted fysik, matematik, verb, vokal; similarly to German, Italian and many others.

More loanwords came from French: paraplu, bureau and so on. Swedish adapted most french loanwords to its spelling: paraply, byrå; while Dutch often maintained the original French spelling: bureau, paraplu, crèche, other times also adapting it as in kostuum (from costume). A large amount of the most recent loanwords comes as you might think from English.

Loanwords from Dutch and Swedish

Some Loanwords from Dutch are Waffle from wafel; Cookie from koekje/koekie, Skate from schaats, but it also had a significant influence on naval terms: Yacht from jacht, short for jachtschip, lit. “hunting ship”; Skipper from Middle Dutch scipper (now schipper), lit. “shipper”; Cruise from Dutch kruisen, “to cross, sail to”. Iceberg probably comes from ijsberg “ice mountain”. Landscape, geek, decoy, pickle, frolic among others also came through Dutch.

The presence of the Dutch during the time of colonization in North America in the 1600s had its effects: Santa Claus comes from Middle Dutch Sinterklaas “Saint Nicholas”, bishop of Minor Asia who became a patron saint for children, celebrated on the 5th and 6th December in the Netherlands and Belgium. Yankee probably comes from Jan-Kees, a person name. Some places around what was called New Amsterdam, a.k.a New York City, have names with Dutch origin: Coney Island from Conyne Eylandt lit. “Rabbit Island” (in modern Dutch konijn and eiland); Harlem and Brooklyn were named after the Dutch towns Haarlem and Breukelen;

Without going back to the influence Old Norse had on shaping English, There aren’t that many loanwords from modern Swedish in it. Some are lingonberry; aquavit (the spirit); ombudsman, a person responsible for investigating complaints against the state.

Many are scientific terms and were constructed with Greek or Latin roots by Swedish scientists: Dynamite from dynamit, coined in 1867 by Swedish chemist and inventor of dynamit, Alfred Nobel; Nickel, coined in 1754 by Swedish mineralogist Axel von Cronstedt, a shortening of kopparnickel, meaning ‘copper-colored ore’. Moped, a complicated abbreviation of (trampcykel med) mo(tor och) ped(aler), “(pedal cycle with) mo(tor and) ped(als)”, coined in 1956. You can find more here.

Language History

Both Swedish and Dutch have their origin in Proto-Germanic. Dutch evolved then from Frankish, spoken by Germanic tribes in the continent; and Swedish from Old Norse, the common language of people living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era.

Medieval Swedish and Dutch

  • Old Norse underwent more changes which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects: Old West Norse (Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden). with the usage of runic alphabet. From 1200 onwards, the dialects in Denmark began to diverge from those of Sweden. In 1225 the Västgöta Law is believed to have been compiled, among the most important documents of the period and oldest Swedish law codes in the latin alphabet.  
  • The early form of Dutch was a set of Franconian dialects: Flemish , Brabantian and Limburgish in the South; Hollandic and Low Saxon in the North of today’s Dutch speaking area.

Modern language & standardization

the advent of the printing press and the European Reformation had great influence in the standardization of languages, The Bible played a significant role, with major translations into Swedish and Dutch between the 16th and 17th century.

  • The Swedish translation of the Bible ordered by the monarch Gustav Vasa introduced the letters Å Ä Ö (previously spelt as æ/a’, ao, oe) and the spelling “ck” in place of “kk”, distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible. All three translators came from central Sweden which is generally seen as adding specific Central Swedish features
  • Dutch had Brabandic and dialects of Flanders as the most influential varieties in its standardisation, later replaced by Hollandic once Antwerp fell under the Spanish army and Holland became the Dutch-speaking areas’s powerhouse. the Statenvertaling (“state translation”), the first major Bible translation into Dutch, was created so that people from all over the new republic could understand. It used elements from various dialects but was predominantly based on the urban dialects of Holland of post 16th century.

The du-reformen

A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the late 1960s, with the so-called du-reformen, “the you-reform”. Previously, the proper way to address people of the same or higher social status had been by title and surname, with the use of herr (“Mr” or “Sir”), fru (“Mrs” or “Ma’am”) or fröken (“Miss”). With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society these class distinctions became less important, and du became the standard in any context.

Main sources: wikipedia and my knowledge

I might write a similar article with infographics differentiating the 3 Scandinavian languages or the other Nordic languages in the future, give me feedback!