Colloquial Dutch: A Complete Course for Beginners

324 Pages·1996·15.48 MB·English

by  Bruce Donaldson

C o llo q u ia l
D u tch
T h e C olloquial S e ries
Series Adviser: Gary King
The following languages are available in the Colloquial series:
Afrikaans Japanese
Albanian Korean
Amharic Latvian
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Arabic of Egypt Malay
Arabic of the Gulf and Norwegian
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Bulgarian Polish
* Cambodian Portuguese
* Cantonese Portuguese of Brazil
* Chinese Romanian
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Danish Slovene
Dutch Somali
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Indonesian Welsh
Italian
Accompanying cassette(s) (*and CDs) are available for the above
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Available in: Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish
Colloquial
D u t c h
The Complete Course
for Beginners
B ru c e D o n a ld s o n
R outledge
Taylor & Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Reprinted 1998, 1999 (twice), 2001, 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 1996 Bruce Donaldson
Illustrations on pages 136-7, 211 and 219 by Matthew Crabbe
Typeset in Times Ten by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
Printed and bound in England by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
The author has asserted his moral rights in accordance with Section 77
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Donaldson, B.C. (Bruce C.), (1948-
Colloquial Dutch : a complete language course / Bruce Donaldson,
p. cm. - (Colloquial series)
1. Dutch language - Grammar. 2. Dutch language - Textbooks for
foreign speakers - English. I. Title.
PF112.D59 1996
439.3182421—dc20 95-35857
CIP
ISBN 0-415-13086-7 (book)
ISBN 0-415-13087-5 (cassettes)
ISBN 0-415-28948-3 (CDs)
ISBN 0-415-13088-3 (book, cassettes and CD course)
C o n te n ts
A b o u t th is b o o k vii
In tro d u ctio n 1
1 P iet en P au lin e en h u n k in d eren 10
Piet and Pauline and their children
2 N ed erlan d en B elgie 23
The Netherlands and Belgium
3 Bij d e g ro e n te b o e r 40
At the greengrocer’s
4 T elefo n eren 57
Telephoning
5 Bij P iet en P au lin e 75
At Piet’s and Pauline’s
6 F ietsen 90
Cycling
7 P a n n en k o ek en 99
Pancakes
8 P iets o u d e rs zijn o p v isite 111
Piet’s parents are visiting
9 N a h e t o n tb ijt 121
After breakfast
10 P au lin e is h a ar h o rlo g e k w ijt 133
Pauline can’t find her watch
vi
11 E en re to u rtje M aastrich t, a lstu b lieft 152
A return ticket to Maastricht, please
12 P au lin es o u d e rs k o m en n a a r N ed erlan d 164
Pauline’s parents come to the Netherlands
13 P au lin e d o e t d e w a s 171
Pauline is doing the washing
14 Er zijn e e k h o o rn s in d e tu in 178
There are squirrels in the garden
15 W at h eb je m e t d e k e rstk a a rte n g e d aa n ? 189
What have you done with the Christmas cards?
16 P iet is o p sch o o l 203
Piet is at school
17 M ariu s w il g aan sp e len 216
Marius wants to go and play
K ey to th e ex erc ises 221
A lp h ab etical list o f irreg u lar v e rb s 249
G lo ssary o f g ram m atical te rm s 255
E n g lish -D u tch g lo ssa ry 262
D u tch -E n g lish g lo ssa ry 281
Index 306
A b o u t th is b o o k
W h e re is D u tc h s p o k e n a n d w h o is it
s p o k e n b y ?
The official name of the country we generally know as Holland is
the Kingdom of the Netherlands, het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden.
Hie everyday official term is Nederland, but colloquially many
people living in the west of the country refer to it as Holland (see
page 24). Hie country, which is only 42,000 square kilometres in
size, has some 15,000,000 inhabitants.
In addition, the northern half of Belgium, known as Flanders
(Vlaanderen), also speaks Dutch while the southern half, known
as WaUonia (Wallonie), speaks French. Of the approximately
10 million inhabitants of the Kingdom of Belgium (het Koninkrijk
Belgie) 58 per cent are Flemings who speak Dutch as their
mother tongue. Hie Netherlands and Belgium, together with
Luxemburg, are known collectively as the Low Countries (de Lage
Landen), which also happens to be the literal meaning of ‘Hie
Netherlands’.
In the live islands of the Dutch Antilles (de Nederiandse
Antillen) and on the island of Aruba, which are constitutionally
part of the Netherlands and whose combined population numbers
some 200,000, Dutch is an official language, although it is not
necessarily the mother tongue of the majority of the population.
Dutch is also the official language of the former Dutch colony
of Surinam (Suriname), which obtained independence from the
Netherlands in 1975. Although many languages are spoken there,
affairs of state and education are conducted in Dutch. The tens of
thousands of Surinamers who have settled in the Netherlands since
the 1970s speak Dutch more or less as their mother tongue, or at
least as proficiently as their mother tongue, which is also the case
with the thousands of people of Indonesian descent who left for
v iii
the Netherlands when the Dutch East Indies gained independence
after World War II.
Many tens of thousands of Dutch people left the country of their
birth after World War II to emigrate to North America, Australia,
South Africa and New Zealand. The number of native-speakers
of Dutch is estimated to be somewhere in excess of 21 million and
Dutch is thus not quite the ‘minor’ language it is sometimes
purported to be.
S ta n d a r d D u tc h /A B N
Standard Dutch is most usually referred to by the abbreviation
ABN, short for Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (General
Cultivated Dutch). ABN is thus the Dutch equivalent of ‘King’s
English’ or ‘RP’ or whatever term you use to designate standard
English. This abbreviation is used from time to time in this book.
Where an asterisk precedes a Dutch construction, e.g. *op het,
this indicates that what follows is ungrammatical, i.e. a construc­
tion that is not possible.
F le m is h u s a g e
The differences between the Dutch and Belgian varieties of the
language are minimal, at least at an official level - at the level of
dialect they can be quite substantial, even to the point of some
Belgian dialects being incomprehensible to a Dutch person, but
this also applies to certain dialects spoken in the Netherlands. There
is an official body, De Nederlandse Taalunie, based in The Hague,
which is charged among other things with keeping the official
Dutch language uniform in the two countries in which it is spoken.
Generally speaking, the northern norm has gradually asserted
itself in Flanders and although Flemish usage, even at the official
level, varies slightly from that of the north (e.g. certain words
and variations in word order sometimes called Algemeen
Zuidnederlands or simply Zufdnederlands), this constitutes no
impediment to mutual comprehension. Consequently the Dutch
presented to you in this book is based solely on ABN as spoken
in the Netherlands.