Dutch - a new dimension to the street sign game

Pretending to be a serious blogger and no posting for a week or so... To my defence, I've been to Holland for a few days and what a pleasure it is to get away from computers, internet and other electronic stuff for a while.

the street-sign-game
For me, a Swede in Hungary, the street signs and advertisement are more part of the game “Guess what is written here..” than actual information. A player in this game gets points every time she understands a word with the final aim to get a full sentence and hopefully to learn some new words or grammar constructions. This game has the great feature that the full message is in many cases lost and the player can escape all stupidities violating our public space such as “How to loose 15 kilos by eating a lots of Christmas food” or "which famous person did what kind of un-interesting things lately".

the Dutch language - a Swedish perspective..
The same game in Holland is very easy, almost too easy. Again, I realised that Dutch (atleast in a written form) is so similar to Swedish. Walking on the street, everything seems to be a bit misspelled (hehe) but it is still very understandable. In addition to all the words that are almost like in Swedish (straks, begreipen, stroom and many more), there are many words inspired from English and also of course with Latin origin. At an outdoor bar, I realised that I can even order my orange juice in French - jus d’orange.. :) What concerns the rest you can easily imagine it from German, even the grammar structure is similar to German. So, as conclusion, if the Dutch language didn’t have all those crazy “hrrch” sound in almost every word, it would be the most easy language to learn!

Maybe one day, I'll give it a try and become one of the 5 millions who have Dutch as a second language. It may even be proven to be useful; Dutch is actually the native language in several countries and also the official one in three Unions. Knowledge of Dutch can also be useful if you want to learn some of the creole languages or Afrikaans. Apparently, also in Namibia many people can understand it. However, without moving to one of these countries it may not be worth it – most Dutch people has a really high level of English and other languages...

Of course, this is not news to anyone, Swedish and Dutch are naturally similar, both being members of the Germanic languages family (North respective West, but still..). Anyhow, I was very happy to play my street-sign-understanding-game in Holland and to bring it to another dimension with the Dutch…:)

And if anyone got tempted to learn.. here is a nice free online course:
http://learndutch.elanguageschool.net/