rimpelbuisobstakelbeveiliger

Klunen = skating word for walking on the ice skates when there is no ice

Niksen= doing nothing on purpose, like resting because you want to do nothing!

Uitbuiken = lying down after eating too much

Werkse = to simple say the long version of "have a nice day at work!!"

Afgieten = peeing after keeping it for too long!!

I’m familiar with a lot of common Dutch “pet names,” particularly those typically used for girls (we have a 4yo daughter as well) or those that are not gender-specific, but I called my 2yo boy “manneke” the other day and my (Dutch) wife looked at me a little weird.

She wasn’t entirely sure why it felt weird, she said that it’s used for boys but she didn’t really think that men usually said it to their boys…neither of us actually care about that kind of thing, but I’m curious anyway. And I’ve been calling him “kleine man” (among many other things of course both Dutch and English) for a while as well and not sure if that’s actually something men here say.

Wife has only sisters and nichtjes, and I didn’t grow up here, so neither of us really know what Dutch men call their young sons.

Any common ones for our little dudes before they hit the “jonge” or international “bruhhhh” phase?

Edit: not going to give a bunch of lazy responses to every comment but every one was read and appreciated. Really appreciate the help everyone, cheers! 🍻

Duolingo puts 'gelukkig' as 'happy'. What's the difference with 'blij'? Are they interchangeable?

EDIT: Wow, that was quick. Thanks everyone for your kind and explanatory replies! I get it now

Like “We’re going on vacation tomorrow”

“sweet!”

Ykw i mean???

Like in english how there is "lol", "btw", "fr", what does Dutch have?

I thought it was:

De reclame: Advertisments/Advertising in general (so referring to multiple advertisements or the concept of advertising)

De advertentie: Specific advertisement

Then why in the sentence "Ik kocht de parfum die ik in een reclame had gezien." we use "de reclame" when it's talking about a specific advert?

Edit: Thank you for your responses! I'm reading them all

I'm asking because in my book it doesn't put de/het at all and keeps it as "hersenen" and in the dictionary here https://www.woorden.org/woord/hersenen it's also without de/het. But when I search on google, I find it to be "de hersenen" so what exactly is it?

Also what is the difference between hersenen and hersens? Is hersens also de hersens or also without de/het?

Context ("De brief voor de koning" van Tonke Dragt):

'Je lijkt me niet bang uitgevallen,' zei broeder Martijn, 'en je hebt niet veel reden meer om rovers te vrezen, zeker niet nu, bij klaarlichte dag.'

Dus Tiuri (de protagonist) werd daarvoor door rovers aangevallen. Het zou voor mij bijna zin hebben, als het betekende "niet bang geworden", maar iets daar is niet tevredigend.

Zoals, hij ziet er al niet bang uit, waarom zou broeder Martijn hem nog kalmeren?

hey guys, still very much a beginner but i'm actually so impressed with how affectionate dutch is. the diminutives and the pet names are specially sweet to me, and my native language (brazilian portuguese) is already known for being a very affectionate one. i was very pleasantly surprised and totally had the wrong idea/bias that it was a cold and emotionless language.

i'd like to know more affectionate and cute dutch words and expressions. how do you refer to loved ones and dear friends? kids maybe? dankjewel 😄 ❤️

I was confused about how to use "ontzaglijk" and then noticed the two other words that have the same meaning possibly?

Is it:

Ontzaglijk : Immense

Vreselijk : Terrible (bad) or Terribly (intensely)?

Verschrikkelijk : Terrible (very intensely terrible)?

What’s the difference between “bedankt” and “dank je wel”? Is it similar to “sorry” and “het spijt mij” where one means “thanks” but you say it when it is the polite thing to do and “dank je wel” means you are really thankful or do they mean something else

I usually end up using Wiktionary because it’s free and has a lot of information. But to be honest I don’t find it very handy when I just want to quickly look up a word.

The pages feel a bit messy and it takes a while to find what I need.

So I’m curious what other people use.

Is there an online dictionary you actually like using day to day?

I was watching this episode of a kids' show, and at about 2:07 someone uses the English word "bitch", which I was very surprised by. You'd certainly never use that word in a piece of kids' media in English, but I suppose its severity is somewhat watered down in Dutch.

I know Dutch people use English swears sometimes, would they generally be considered inoffensive and/or acceptable for children, or is this instance an outlier?

Hi everyone, just as the title says, I want to use some terms of endearment for my boyfriend who is Flemish, he doesn't really know I've been trying to learn at least some basic Dutch as a surprise. I've been trying to find Flemish resources but Google is kinda unreliable.

Dank u in advance!

All the "purist" had to do to trigger me, was to write:

"I am a purist and I stop listening once I hear "wou/wouden (in stead of wilde/wilden)".

Well, I am an opposite kind of purist (born 1995 and raised in Amsterdam) - one who immediately stops listening when somebody says that they stop listening once they hear "wou/wouden" in stead of "wilde(n)" and apparently one who starts ranting for an hour about it on his phone.

In my experience, people who get triggered by "wou/wouden", "groter/kleiner als", double negations or even "Hun hebben" are extremely boring people with usually bureaucratic/university-ish jobs, sitting behind a screen all day while having nothing interesting to talk about. They think they know a lot about Dutch while in fact they tend to know absolutely nothing about the history of Dutch beyond the mid 19th century efforts to standardize the language. They know just enough to think that they know everything - boring, chauvinistic, university educated, closed minded, supericial snobs from the West (Randstad), who above all tend to make fun of people from other parts of the country for their accents (Frisia, Limburg, Twente, Zeeland etc.).

I bet you most of them have never read a single line of Vondel or Hooft in their original spelling, or the original Statenbijbel, or middle age Dutch (Diets) or even more recent writers like Couperus for that matter. They present their cases as if they were weeding a garden, whereas in fact they are cutting down so many ancient trees and flowers that have been growing in the Netherlands for ages, even millennia. Just a single case in point about the aforementioned (and rather recent) Couperus:

Couperus writes "Eline Vere, zo rank als een kapel." Most of these snobs will think Couperus is comparing Eline Vere to a building, because they have no idea that there used to be dozens upon dozens of words for "vlinder" (butterfly) in the Netherlands, each carrying their own (regional) connotations and nuances. But then some committee of boring, grey, semi-illiterate bureaucrats got together in the 19th and 20th centuries to decide on all sorts of standardizations. They basically rubber-stamped the word "vlinder" and rooted out all the other beautiful words (like "kapel") that used to exist in the process, severing our natural connection with the past.

Exactly the same goes for wilden/wouden. The former is the (south-)western form, the latter is a more (north-)eastern form of exactly the same verb (cf. wollten in German), which has existed forever all over the Netherlands (e.g. in west-Frisian or so many other dialects). Once again, some boring committee came along and decided on the south-western form. The same goes for the more Western "groter dan" (cf. English bigger than) vs the more Eastern "groter als" (cf. German großer als).

Just one final case and I'll leave you alone: many of these gray mice get triggered and all uppety when you do not pronounce world final -n ("netjes je ennetjes uitspreken, kneus"). So eteNN, or lopeNNN or drinkeNNNNN. They have no idea that the pronunciation of the (multisyllabic) word final -n was dropped already by the late middle Ages all over Holland (in the West), which is evident from all sorts of medieval manuscripts/inscriptions which you can still read on gable stones (gevelstenen). E.g. the rederijkerskamer (a literary society) in Haarlem from 1503 called "Trouw moet blijken", spelled their name as "Trou moet blycke" (dropping the word final -n, as they did not pronounce it).

Once again, some committee came in and decided on standardising the written -n in plural forms, in order to distinguish plural (indicative) verbs from subjunctive verbs (subjunctive as in Leve de koning(in), Kome wat komt, koste wat het kost, God verdomme etc. etc.).

Fun fact: to this day people always pronounce word final -n in the East (as in German), yet these snobs will still make fun of people from the east and their accents because they drop the e right before the n (loop'n instead of lopen). Basically: if you do not speak Dutch exactly as these pedants tell you to, you will be made fun of.

Instead of taking "wouden" for an expression of illiteracy, you should be taking it as an expression of a very natural continuum that can tell you all sorts of things about the speaker. It's so idiotic (in the original Greek, closed-minded sense of the word) that one would not be looking further than your nose is long (as we say in Dutch); that one would not be interested in WHY people speak how they speak. They have had their natural humanity churned out of them by the gearwheels of "higher education", not unlike Charley Chaplin. I dare say most of their thoughts are basic bitch exponents of uniformity and standardisation as well. People have no idea they are being lived. Their thoughts are not their own. Their language has been standardised for them as has their furniture, their food, their dating apps, basically their entire life the further and further we slip into the big-data hellscape of standardised, cyborgified post-post-modernity.

Rebel against this bullshit! Oh, how I long back to the days when monks would write the exact same word on the exact same page three times, but with three different spellings, just to stick it to these snobs! They knew what it meant to be human, that language was made to be an exponent of our humanity. People were not made to be ruled by the snobistic whims of standardization. Or, as the Monk would have said: De Sabbath is gemaeckt om den mensche, niet de mensche om den Sabbath.

P.S. don't get me wrong, this is not just a Dutch, but a global phenomenon. You will find Chinese/Indian/Arabic redditeers complaining about exactly the same phenomenon, but applied to their linguistic and cultural heritage.

P.P.S. I'll leave "hun hebben" and many similar examples for another time.

Hij reageert even verstandig als zijn broer.

HIj reageert net zo verstandig als zijn broer.

What is the difference between these two sentences?
When to use "even" and when to use "net zo"?

Hi.

I have created decks from official wordlist of taalcompleet A1 and A2 for my own use. Thought maybe it's a good idea to share with fellow learners. Backside is English (and persian too). Pronunciation included. Enjoy :)

new to anki?
Get one of the official apps from https://apps.ankiweb.net/, then download a deck from the links below. Import the apkg file to your app and you are good to go. iOS version is not free, but you can always import decks in desktop or android, then use https://ankiweb.net/ on you iOS device.

TaalCompleet A1

TaalCompleet A2

Waarom hebben en leren kinderen en jongeren tegenwoordig niet meer de skill om betekenissen van (spreek)woorden te achterhalen d.m.v. context en woordanalyse?

Serieus, dit was het eerste wat ik leerde in groep 3: "Als je een woord niet kent, kijk dan naar de context en de delen waaruit het bestaat"!

Waarom kunnen mensen dat tegenwoordig niet meer? Vooral kinderen en jongeren!

"Oh NeE! iN dEzE zIn KoMt ÉéN wOoRd VoOr DaT iK nIeT kEn! Nu KaN iK tOtAaL nIeT aChTeRhAlEn WaT dIe ZiN eN dAt WoOrD bEtEkEnEn!"

En nee, dit is niet een probleem dat ik me inbeeld! Ik heb letterlijk deze situatie meermaals van dichtbij gezien!

Hetzelfde geldt trouwens voor Middelnederlands: heel goed te begrijpen (vooral als je het hardop leest), maar veel jongeren vinden het "onbegrijpelijk".

Een letterlijke interactie tussen mij (vwo 5 destijds) [IK] en een klasgenoot (havo 4ish) [HIJ]:

HIJ: Karel ende Elegast is onbegrijpelijk! Waarom moeten we dit lezen? Dat kan toch niet?

IK: Tuurlijk wel! Prima te volgen als je een beetje oplet wat je leest!

HIJ: Oh ja? Wat betekent [leest twee zinnen voor] dan?

IK (verbaasd dat get niet overduidelijk is): [vertaal de zinnen]

HIJ (tegen buurman): HOE WEET HIJ DAT?!

Dat weet ik, doordat het heel erg lijkt op modern Nederlands en ik let op wat ik hoor.

Waarom zijn mensen deze skill aan het verliezen?

Hoi allemaal, I have been learning Dutch for about 18 months, probably to a high A1 level. I need help translating a few idioms that I use frequently when speaking English.

1. "For the craic" - Irish English, basically "because it's fun" or "because it amuses me"

2. "In a pickle" - to be in a difficult situation. I don't think "Ik ben binnen een augurk" conveys quite the same meaning!

3. "Teaching [someone] how to suck eggs" - basically to lecture someone on a matter they are already very familiar with. Don't try to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs.

Dankjewel, iedereen!

12/31/25

Hallo! Ik ben een Redditor uit de Verenigde Staten. Ik wil leren Nederlands, maar ik doe het niet. Ik zeggen het "te moeilijk" en stop. Ik weet het neit het woorden maar ik wil leer en het wil be makelijker. Ook, ik wil doe het niet te vertaal woorden, ik zal gebruik zoek woorden (These will be bold to not make it seem like I'm improving faster than I really am). Ik wil praat over interesses voor later dagen. Het spijt me voor probleems. Dankjewel! Zeggen te je morgen!

Couple questions...

1. What are some basic English Suffixes and Prefixes in Dutch, (ex. -ed, de-, -ing, and -ble)

2. I've been watching TV Shows in English with Dutch subtitles and figuring out what each word means but am I doing it right or am going about it completely wrong.

3. Lastly, I get overwhelmed when trying to learn this language and freak out and quit due to insane amount of stuff to do and not a place to start. Is there a way to figure out what to do next? I've read other reddit posts about this an they all say to "Focus on one thing at a time" but I don't know where to start.

(Ok seriously I dont know if yall can read this but please dont be shy and please correct for my mistakes or bad usage of words. Also share some new vocab I can use for tomorrow. Anyways Happy New Year!)

Schaat zo errugg??