I've always heard that Dutch (and one of its northern variants) is the closest language to English in the world, yet it is clumped together in this map with languages from a much different linguistic origin. Romance languages should be harder to learn than West Germanic languages, which include English, Dutch and German, yet some of the Romance languages are listed here as easier than German. So that surprises me. Many sentences sound almost identical between Dutch and English, for example. You can't really say that about a Romance language. And the structure of the English language has much more in common with Dutch and German than with most other languages.
I moved to Belgium 7 years ago from the UK. I live in the Dutch speaking half.
I had a very rudimentary grasp of Dutch after 18 months mostly through just speaking to my mother-in-law and watching Dutch TV.
Then I spent another 18 months doing 3 hours a week evening classes. After that I was proficient enough to have hour long conversations.
I don't find it very similar to English, if anything the similarities makes it worse because they often mean something else. It is very close to German and I can understand some German now. You do spot lots of interesting similarities but everything is backwards for starters, it's "four and twenty" not "twenty four" and "what want you eating?" instead of "what do you want to eat?". So it's kind of similar but you sound really stupid unless you get it in the right order.
I think there's a big difference between making yourself understood and speaking without making errors. I've made a big effort to try to get the accent correct which very few do.
Dutch in general is much closer to Shakespeare's era of English, which is not modern English. Shakespeare includes phrases like "he knows not what he does" instead of modern English, "he doesn't know what he is doing." The "is ..." conjugations are a relatively recent invention in English, and Dutch more closely follows old English-style construction.
I did try to imagine myself speaking Shakespearian English at times in the beginning.
That's actually the problem of translating Shakespeare into Dutch, it just sounds normal and less romantic.
"Romeo, where are you?"
If they'd translate it into old Dutch [0] it would give a better feel of the language but still wouldn't be correct as Old Dutch died out in the 12th century.
“Wherefore art thou Romeo” isn’t confusing to modern English speakers because of the archaic “art thou”, it’s confusing to modern English speakers because it actually means “why are you [named] Romeo [implicitly, Montague]”, the where- prefix has nothing to do with location.
It’s extremely common for modern speakers to be unaware what wherefore means.
Although thinking about it, my 5yo daughter does make the same mistake when she speaks English (she translates literally from Dutch), for example she'll say "what going we eating?".
But you have lots of these, "wil je naar huis?" / "want you to home?"
"ik geloof er niks van" / "I believe there nothing from"
In my head I usually hear the English words and it always just sounds really stupid.
I think that's just because as a new learner of a language, you are still thinking in your native language, not in the language you are trying to speak.
I've learned that it is easier to learn a language if you try to skip that intermediate translation process. Dutch is actually simpler than English in many ways (just as Old English is simpler than Modern English). Part of your and your daughter's confusion is perhaps because the same verb tense can be said in multiple ways in English, but in Dutch is usually only said in one way.
In English you might have "we are eating" and "we eat" that both represent now, but in Dutch it is usually just the latter. Similarly in English you might have "we will eat tomorrow", "we are going to eat tomorrow," etc, but even the Dutch use the present tense for this, "we eat tomorrow."
In fact, Dutch even skips verb conjugations entirely half the time, and just uses the infinite.
I'm pretty sure I over use 'aan het' just to get the 'ing' back.
"Wij zijn aan het eten"
As far as making the mistake, I should just know better. I got to a level that was good enough and have stagnated there. So I make lots of small mistakes, but often I'm not aware of them.
It occurs to me that the following all mean nearly the same thing in English:
We are going to eat tomorrow
We will eat tomorrow
We will be eating tomorrow
We are going to be eating tomorrow
There might be others I'm not thinking of right now.
Modern English has a lot of extra subtlety.
Dutch:
We eat tomorrow.
Not only is a future tense avoided, and an -ing tense is avoided, and a lot of filler words avoided, but also the present tense is avoided since in Dutch, the infinitive verb itself is the actual present tense about half the time (which cannot really be translated literally here)! Such simplicity doesn't really exist in English.
I find Dutch a lot like learning an elegant, dynamically-typed programming language.
The -ing stuff is just filler a lot of the time, so the Dutch wisely just don't do that most of the time.
I don't think they are the same thing. "We will" is a stronger statement in intent than "We are going." "We will elect Trump!" versus "We are going to elect Trump!" may refer to the same election, but the former would be followed by a stronger statement:
We will elect Trump! It's great!
We are going to elect Trump! I'm excited!
I don't think it's a hard and fast rule, but if people use the future tense, it's more of a personal or indefinite statement, and the present tense is more universal and definite one.
"We elect Trump tomorrow." is something that misses this. You remove the individual ability to affirm or weaken the statement. I don't know much about Dutch and English, but I'd wonder if many Dutch people fluent in English have problems with getting taken too definitely or being seen as pushy.
English is an unusual case in that English dropped most of its inflection as it transitioned from Old English to Middle English, and then heavily adopted Romance roots (first Norman French for a fair few common terms, then Latin for advanced scientific terms). Thus a native English-speaker already has a greater familiarity with the functional vocabulary of Romance languages than they do with other Germanic languages. Meanwhile, what should have been the grammatical leg-up from being a Germanic language doesn't exist, so the grammatical ease of learning French versus German are going to be roughly equivalent. Although Romance might be somewhat easier, since it's a two-gender system unlike the Germanic three-gender system.
The closest language to English is Frisian, which isn't a variant of Dutch (English and Frisian broke off from West Germanic as Anglo-Frisian, and an Englishman could well pass for Frisian in Medieval times). Dutch broke off at the same time as Anglo-Frisian, and it evolved somewhat towards English and Frisian (particularly in some of the phonology).
As someone whose only competent foreign language is French, I'll point out that Frisian and Dutch are in no way intelligible (although I'm mostly going by written varieties here, and it should be noted that Frisian and Dutch butcher their orthography on the same order that English does). Occasionally, you do come across a sentence in Dutch or Frisian that is completely well-understood, but most of the rest of the text remains fairly impenetrable.
From what I've heard anecdotally, the interesting thing about Dutch is that it seems to unintelligible to English or German monoglots, but English/German bilinguals tend to find it quite easy to understand.
English, while a Germanic language, is highly influenced by Latin and French in particular and thus has commonalities with Romance languages. Dutch is closest but the issue with German is grammar which is different enough from English to make it harder to acquire. For instance German has four cases and gender but English has largely done away with both of these.
You agree that Dutch is closest but I wonder why it is clumped together with languages that are generally more difficult, like French and Spanish. Perhaps the map doesn't have enough resolution to be so meaningful in that way.
Dutch is a Germanic language, like German. However, it contains many loanwords from other languages:
* Greek
* Latin
* French
* German
* English
Dutch teenagers get to learn all of these languages (although to be fair only the most difficult education called gymnasium will follow Latin or Greek and they're allowed to pick one of these, ditch the other).
A lot of these loanwords from Greek and Latin you'll find in other Anglo-Saxon, Romanic, and Germanic languages.
The Romanic and Germanic languages also contain some loan words which you'll find within each other.
More recently, the USA and English have become rather dominant and important in the last centuries, and we're much less distant from each other thanks to technologies like aviation, radio, television, and Internet.
Its like figuring out you got some of the same DNA as someone else while you got the same ancestors like for example the gene for being tolerant to lactose which Europeans generally have whilst Asians don't.
The other side of the blade is that we're also in a bubble; our own bubble tells us English is important for it is in the tech-industry which is the general population of HN. These people are generally proficient in English.
Yet if you go to small villages in France or Germany or The Netherlands (and probably about any country in the world) you'll find people who speak say a dialect of their native language and that's it. Because they don't live like globalists.
That's OK, we should accept that (tho in the EU its rather expensive to translate to and from all the languages!). There are people (as well as AI) who can serve as a bridge between these languages.
Dutch is a combination of German and English, my Dutch friends tell me. German is a tough language to learn. The grammar diverges from English significantly. I'm using the source as myself since I've been learning for the last 2 years.
I've also learned some basic Spanish and Portuguese, I found them easier to pick up. I've heard it's possible to have some fluency in Spanish in 3 - 6 months. I think it would be very difficult to achieve this in Germany.
In the end it depends on the learner as well. My experience learning languages is that it's hard no matter what!
If you want to really see how close the relationship between the Germanic languages are, line up some sentences German, Norwegian (or Danish or Swedish), Dutch, English, Icelandic next to each other, and then a second group with Middle High German, Norse (for the modern Scandinavian languages), Old Dutch, Middle English, Icelandic.
Basically if you pick up any modern pair, you get a ton for free. Pick up a third, or even just learn a decent amount about one, and you start picking up a lot of patterns that lets you infer meanings. If any of the modern pairs includes Icelandic, you'll benefit strongly from knowing the older versions of the other one in the pair...
Learn the patterns of how newer forms of your own language derive from the older, and you'll find you'll start being able to "shift down, sideways and back up" very often.
E.g. Dutch or German sch => sk in the Scandinavian languages. "u" in middle of a word => "o". Hence "Schule" => "skole" (school). There's dozens of simple transliteration rules like that.
In terms of older forms, an example from Norwegian that illustrates the closer relationships, that I'm particularly fond of because it's an oddity, is "vel bekomme".
It is a pleasantry that basically means "you're welcome" specifically used after a meal. It's a fun one because while "vel" ("well") is still used in modern Norwegian in many contexts, including in e.g. "velkommen" (welcome), "bekomme" now doesn't even figure in most dictionaries on it's own, and some younger Norwegians would struggle to explain what the word means on its own (I'm 42, and my generation too rarely used it separate from the phrase "vel bekomme", but were quite likely to hear it in somewhat wider use in our childhood)
But it's the same word as German "bekommen" one of the meanings of which is for food to "agree" with you, and with etymology that converges with the etymology of English "become".
Which sounds weird until you deconstruct both into roughly a mix of "to take on" (characteristics of), "to receive" (well).
The fun thing is that when directly transliterating the words into the closest German/Dutch cognates, it's not perfect, but it's close enough that if you know the history of the words, it's becomes obvious in context.
At which point the other (archaic; you may still find old people use it, but even that is becoming rare) Norwegian use makes sense: "Det bekommer Dem" => literally "it becomes you" (in the meaning "it suits you")
For some younger Norwegian speakers, that latter Norwegian phrase is now so unusual that it's sometimes first when they learn German or learn the English phrase that the meaning fully "clicks".
From a linguistic perspective, languages being geneologically close to each other does not imply a degree of mutual intelligibility. Dutch and English are close, closer than German and English. But it is possible that English speakers end up learning Spanish easier. Why? Languages are really complex structures, sometimes they don't reason.
I think the reason Americans are morely likely to learn Spanish easier is simply because of the huge and relatively recent influence of widespread Spanish all over the States, thanks to proximity to Mexico. Most Americans are already familiar (to varying degrees) with Spanish whether they intend to be or not.
I bet if you gave a native English speaker exposure to Dutch in the same way, they'd be much closer to actually speaking it than with the same exposure to Spanish.
If you hear a Dutch person say "the water is warm," or "the cat sat on the mat", or "if I can," or many other simple sentences and phrases, the unassuming listener might think they are speaking English as the sentences are nearly identical.
