Comment by icc97 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icc97 | Hacker News Reader

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I moved to Belgium 7 years ago from the UK. I live in the Dutch speaking half.

I had a very rudimentary grasp of Dutch after 18 months mostly through just speaking to my mother-in-law and watching Dutch TV.

Then I spent another 18 months doing 3 hours a week evening classes. After that I was proficient enough to have hour long conversations.

I don't find it very similar to English, if anything the similarities makes it worse because they often mean something else. It is very close to German and I can understand some German now. You do spot lots of interesting similarities but everything is backwards for starters, it's "four and twenty" not "twenty four" and "what want you eating?" instead of "what do you want to eat?". So it's kind of similar but you sound really stupid unless you get it in the right order.

I think there's a big difference between making yourself understood and speaking without making errors. I've made a big effort to try to get the accent correct which very few do.

"Four and twenty" is idiomatic English in that it survives in the children's nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence.

It was composed around the same time that William of Orange reigned as king of the UK, so maybe that's a Dutch influence on our language!

I only know this because Four'n Twenty is the unofficial national dish of Melbourne. :)

Dutch in general is much closer to Shakespeare's era of English, which is not modern English. Shakespeare includes phrases like "he knows not what he does" instead of modern English, "he doesn't know what he is doing." The "is ..." conjugations are a relatively recent invention in English, and Dutch more closely follows old English-style construction.

I did try to imagine myself speaking Shakespearian English at times in the beginning.

That's actually the problem of translating Shakespeare into Dutch, it just sounds normal and less romantic.

"Romeo, where are you?"

If they'd translate it into old Dutch [0] it would give a better feel of the language but still wouldn't be correct as Old Dutch died out in the 12th century.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dutch

“Wherefore art thou Romeo” isn’t confusing to modern English speakers because of the archaic “art thou”, it’s confusing to modern English speakers because it actually means “why are you [named] Romeo [implicitly, Montague]”, the where- prefix has nothing to do with location.

It’s extremely common for modern speakers to be unaware what wherefore means.

Yeah, that's why I used that example :)

But it's really hard when you have to translate fluently

A better example is four and seventy, I always hear forty seven then have to realise I'm wrong and switch.

People say their phone numbers in pairs so you have to do this switching very fast as people are used to repeating their number.

You are exaggerating slightly.

If you say "wat wil je eten," there is no "eating." It's "to eat," in this case, like in English. "Eten" is the infinitive.

A literal word-for-word translation would be "what want you to eat?"

Didn't mean to exaggerate, I'm just wrong :)

Thanks for spotting it.

Although thinking about it, my 5yo daughter does make the same mistake when she speaks English (she translates literally from Dutch), for example she'll say "what going we eating?".

But you have lots of these, "wil je naar huis?" / "want you to home?"

"ik geloof er niks van" / "I believe there nothing from"

In my head I usually hear the English words and it always just sounds really stupid.

> In my head I usually hear the English words

I think that's just because as a new learner of a language, you are still thinking in your native language, not in the language you are trying to speak.

I've learned that it is easier to learn a language if you try to skip that intermediate translation process. Dutch is actually simpler than English in many ways (just as Old English is simpler than Modern English). Part of your and your daughter's confusion is perhaps because the same verb tense can be said in multiple ways in English, but in Dutch is usually only said in one way.

In English you might have "we are eating" and "we eat" that both represent now, but in Dutch it is usually just the latter. Similarly in English you might have "we will eat tomorrow", "we are going to eat tomorrow," etc, but even the Dutch use the present tense for this, "we eat tomorrow."

In fact, Dutch even skips verb conjugations entirely half the time, and just uses the infinite.

I'm pretty sure I over use 'aan het' just to get the 'ing' back.

"Wij zijn aan het eten"

As far as making the mistake, I should just know better. I got to a level that was good enough and have stagnated there. So I make lots of small mistakes, but often I'm not aware of them.

It occurs to me that the following all mean nearly the same thing in English:

     We are going to eat tomorrow
     We will eat tomorrow
     We will be eating tomorrow
     We are going to be eating tomorrow

There might be others I'm not thinking of right now.

Modern English has a lot of extra subtlety.

Dutch:

     We eat tomorrow.

Not only is a future tense avoided, and an -ing tense is avoided, and a lot of filler words avoided, but also the present tense is avoided since in Dutch, the infinitive verb itself is the actual present tense about half the time (which cannot really be translated literally here)! Such simplicity doesn't really exist in English.

I find Dutch a lot like learning an elegant, dynamically-typed programming language.

The -ing stuff is just filler a lot of the time, so the Dutch wisely just don't do that most of the time.

I don't think they are the same thing. "We will" is a stronger statement in intent than "We are going." "We will elect Trump!" versus "We are going to elect Trump!" may refer to the same election, but the former would be followed by a stronger statement:

We will elect Trump! It's great! We are going to elect Trump! I'm excited!

I don't think it's a hard and fast rule, but if people use the future tense, it's more of a personal or indefinite statement, and the present tense is more universal and definite one.

"We elect Trump tomorrow." is something that misses this. You remove the individual ability to affirm or weaken the statement. I don't know much about Dutch and English, but I'd wonder if many Dutch people fluent in English have problems with getting taken too definitely or being seen as pushy.

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