I'm a little surprised how much of that knowing Danish allows me to reasonably interpret when reading it. It's just a pity I made this marvelous discovery trying to read something written by fucking Geert Wilders.
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And still manages to have a more consistent spelling than English.
I believe that applies to literally every language other than English.
Even French.
EauxK Buddy
I'm german, never learned dutch and the only part I couldn't make sense of is "mbt de dwangwet".
That being said, Geert Wilders is a racist cunt and right wing populist.
Mbt = "met betrekking tot", basically means regarding. Dwangwet translates to Zwangsgesetz in German.
Thanks, though that doesn't help that much. I don't think we have these kind of laws in Germany (or I have never heard of that, though a quick internet search only shows laws about when police is allowed to force something).
I had to look it up, but the "dwangwet" is a name the right gave to the "spreidingswet", a law meant to force municipalities to provide shelter to asylum seekers. It's far right framing, they wanted to (and succeeded) block this law from passing. Goal of the block is according to them something aking to "muh freedoms", if you ask me it was meant to force problems with said asylum seekers. These problems didn't materialize, with the ultimate effect of Geert Wilders' PVV party leaving the coalition.
This is a very condensed version of two years of political scheming, so there's a lot more to be said than this.
I got this much:
Wir haben ein seriöses Problem mit den politischen Entwicklungen [???] und ich hoffe, dass dies in den kommenden Tagen gelöst[?] werden kann
So like 85% understandable 😁
Does indeed often sound horrible. Is, however, quite comprehensive.
I can't even understand it and yet it still manages to make me sick, like strawberry Quick. Thanks Lucas!
This guy has been doing stupid hair and spewing far right bullshit for longer than trump.
Pretty sure he didn’t blow bubba though.
As a Norwegian, I understood all but one word.
Was it "dwangwet"? That's the one word I didn't understand. (Except for maybe mbt which I think is a misspelling of the Dutch term for "with")
That was the one. I read the mbt as a similar acronym as in Norwegian, mtp, meaning 'in regards to'.
Ah, you're right. According to a random Dutch website it's short for "met betrekking tot".
Though to be fair, the matching German abbreviation is "bzgl." because why use three words when you can just say "regarding".
While "met betrekking tot" is pretty archaic in and of itself, the shorter "betreffende" sounds even more archaic. I think a more commonly used word in daily speech would be "over".
The abbreviation written out, my translation would have been word for word, and not guesswork. I know Dutch and Norwegian are very similar grammatically, so I'd assume it is the same in that using just the word for 'regarding' would just not make any grammatical sense, hence why we have the acronym. Simplification without simplifying anything, now that is efficient simplicity.
Ah, that's nice to know. Also I finally figured out what "dwangwet" means because for some reason this Reddit post is the top result:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/19amlup/dutch_cant_be_a_real_language/
The top comment does seem very slightly familiar. Even the use of brackets wtf
Word for word, 'met betrekking tot' is directly something like 'med betraktning for' = 'with consideration towards' in modern language, while the modern Norwegian version of the same is 'med tanke på' = 'with thought on'.
Meaning the same, but the old one sounds archaic, from the time when Norwegian had formal and informal language, like most languages still has, but that somehow disappeared gradually after the war, to the degree that we now often sound rude.
Because Dutch and English are both Germanic languages "forcibly wooed" by the Pepe Le Pews
English and Dutch are cousin languages who are relatively close by Germanic standards, though if you want a real mind fuck listen to or read Frisian. Also the old Runic alphabet for the Lowlands and England are called anglo-frisian runes.
South African here. I got about half,but my Afrikaans (derived from dutch) is not great. )
The difference between grammatical and literal translations is always so funny. Here, let me explain:
Dutch: geef me een klap papa
Norwegian literal: gi meg en klapp, pappa
Nor to English literal: give me a clap, dad
Norwegian situational; smekk meg, far 😏
Nor to English literal: smack me, father 😏
I was told dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. Lots of meaningless words are often used to pad a sentence which in essence can be left out.
Zou het misschien een beetje mogelijk zijn om iets te doen?
Zou het mogelijk zijn om iets te doen?
Same thing
Was made aware of this by a dutch teacher and never looked the same at how we construct sentences. The words are added for a perceived kindness, but confuse non native speakers.

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