A Dutch treat
The Rittenhouse Review thinks it’s easy to learn Dutch:
?SPREEKT JE NEDERLANDS??: You know, a person who can read both English and German is apt to find learning Dutch to be sort of a breeze. And then from there it?s a quick jaunt over to Afrikaans, which, as a wise man once said, is really just Dutch dumbed-down so the Boers would be able to write complete sentences.
Sadly though, Jim got it wrong. One of the little traps every forreigner falls for is the “t-question”: when to add a “t” to the end of a present tense verb. First person singular (I/ik), you don’t, second (you/je) and third person (he-she/hij-zij) singular, you do. Except, if you ask a question in the
second person singular, like Jim does above, you don’t. Hence, it should be Spreek je Nederlands? instead of spreekt je Nederlands?. The same if you command somebody to do something: Spreek Nederlands!, not Spreekt Nederlands.
That’s what you get when you insult Afrikaans, which can really be an incredibly beautiful and haunting language, even if it does sound somewhat childlike at first to a Dutch speaker; the sentence structure is often similar to how a child would create Dutch sentences. The other main language in the Dutch family, Vlaams (Flemish) also has that sort of fascination for northern Dutch speakers, as again it sounds both beautiful and wrong at the same time if you’re not used to it. It’s far softer then the harsh syllables of Dutch, which some have compared to vigorious throat scraping.