Hi. I'm wondering if anyone could recommend a good way to learn Dutch. A few months ago, I came across this website How to learn Japanese from tofugu. It recommended learning hiragana, basic kanji pronunciation, how to pronounce characters, and everything related to mnemonics in order to remember everything as well as possible.

I wonder if anyone could recommend a good way to learn Dutch? Perhaps someone who is currently learning it or has a favorite set of Anki flashcards or a YouTube channel worth recommending?

Picture of Dutch woman in Japan

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[+] 79 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you speak English most people in the Netherlands probably already speak it better than you.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I'm aware of that. But I was thinking to go there and I'm sure some would appreciate it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I once asked a Dutch friend what would be a good phrase to learn before visiting Amsterdam. He thought for a minute and said "sneeuwklokjes". Snowdrops. It was his kindly way of saying don't bother, lol. I did learn a few things - hello, please, thanks - and they did go down well.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I used to work for a publisher in the Netherlands called Coutinho, they specialize in second language acquisition and have some excellent materials on Dutch. Probably not for free, though.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've started using Dutch in 3 Months, by Hugo. Ignoring the timeframe the title gives, it seems decent because it has an app alongside it for hearing the pronunciations of each word, so you learn to speak and read essentially at the same time.

    I got my book online.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    In my own personal experience: live in The Netherlands and go work in a small company were pretty much everybody is Dutch and the management wants to help you learn Dutch (so they keep doing all meetings in Dutch even though everybody there could speak English).

    After a couple of years living there working in English-speaking multinational environments and thus without learning much Dutch, that specific situation forced my Dutch speaking skills to improve massively in a mere 3 months.

    Otherwise it's pretty hard to learn Dutch, IMHO, unless you're starting from German (even better, Swiss-German) which is maybe the closest language to it (and Dutch grammar is actually simpler).

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    For spoken language learning, nothing beats the Pimsleur method. Easily found by those, who sail the high seas

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