Approximately 23 million people have Dutch as their native tongue, making it seventh on the list of languages spoken in the European Union.

Although most of those speakers live in the Netherlands, Dutch is also used by half of the population of Belgium (mainly in the north) and interestingly, it is the official language of the Republic of Suriname in northern South America.

The Dutch have long been recognised as one of history’s leading maritime nations and many words of Dutch origin are still used in this field today. Some examples include: deck, yacht and freight.

Dutch is a Germanic language which means speakers of German, English, Danish and Swedish will find a lot of common factors. Dutch spelling is supposedly easy compared to many other languages, as too is the basic grammar principles. If you are able to grasp the rules of how to conjugate regular verbs, then you are away. Unfortunately, irregular verbs are a different story and must be learnt by heart.

Two of the hardest parts of learning Dutch grammar are the word order and pronunciation. There is a guttural ‘g’ used that most English speakers will find hard to master. Again, like learning any language that is foreign to you, the best way is to expose yourself to speakers on a regular basis or by listening to everything and anything you can. Try listening to the radio, (eg. BBC World Service), watch a movie or search out something fun like YouTube that can be spontaneous and harder to understand than a usual language learning CD.

There are a lot of Dutch-speaker Australians so ask around and see if there is a local organisation in the area you live or work that you may be able to visit or meet up with. In one of my workplaces I had three Dutch speakers who liked nothing better that “chat” over their morning coffee.

Dutch has three articles: the indefinite article ‘een’ (a) and the definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ (the). Luckily you do not need to use different articles or adjectives for subjects and objects, and adjectives are inflected according to the type of noun they precede (de or het + noun).

When I travelled to the Netherlands in 1994, the capital Amsterdam was packed to capacity as people celebrated the Queen’s birthday long weekend. Unfortunately my Dutch was non-existent but the locals were wonderful and luckily for me, many were fluent in English and more that happy to help me out.

By Vicky