The signs at the airport should be reassuring. Welcome to the Netherlands! What could be easier to figure out? Dutch has been rightly described as between German and English, which means that while all three are closely related west Germanic languages, Dutch is closer to English. (Frisian, spoken on a string of islands along the coast, is even closer.)
Pick up a Dutch newspaper, and your first impression will be reinforced. economist.com. May 2014. The local freesheet tells me that “een nieuwe komedie” is appearing starring Charlize Theron. This new comedy is called “Een Miljoen Domme Manieren om Dood te Gaan”, and if you squint (and happen to know the English title) you can easily see “a million dumb manners for dead to go”, or “a million dumb ways to die”. (In English the film is called “A Million Ways to Die in the West”.) The movie is “van de maker van Ted”, “from the maker of Ted” (another comedy). And so on. If you have a bit of German, even the words that don’t look like English are usually clear. (Reports of an “ongeluk” are clearly about an “accident”, just like the German Unglück.)
So if you speak German and English you can learn Dutch in about 15 minutes, right? Wrong. Not, at least, if you want to go beyond the newspaper and speak to anyone. A German room-mate once described Dutch as “sounding like a throat illness”. The English-speaking native can be forgiven a raised eyebrow upon hearing this from a German.
