Dutch

During my 3 years living in Tilburg, I devoted significant time to learning Dutch. I began with Rosetta Stone, which was useful for the basics, but never did any university courses. From my experience, it is somewhat difficult to find good Dutch resources, especially when it comes to trying to get past intro level. But over time I was able to find what I needed (often through my local library) and thought I should share what I've found with anyone who might be interested.

1. I found this book fairly helpful, especially when I was starting. At the back it has a really short and extremely useful grammatical reference section, including a list of irregular verbs. It also does a very good job of presenting sample conversations that actually match how Dutch people talk.

2. The book Dubbel Dutch by Kevin Cook is a total gem. It's written by a British guy who moved to the Netherlands and at some point started taking notes on all of the things that he found puzzling about the language. There's a lot in it that you can't find anywhere else. It's also entertaining and gives a lot of insights into Dutch culture. For instance, there is a long and informative entry listing Dutch profanities and ranking them in terms of their comparative level of offensiveness. A particularly useful section is that on "Er".

3. http://nos.nl/livestream/npo-nieuws.html is good for Dutch news, since they often repeat the same 10-15 minutes of stories over and over. So even if you don't understand what's going on the first time, you might have a better sense by the 3rd. There's really no substitute for listening to a lot of Dutch.

(Be aware that newscasters tend to speak in ABN (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands) which is basically the Dutch equivalent of BBC English. So it's easy to get overconfident from understanding the Dutch news and then struggle when listening to Dutch people with regional accents - meaning everyone off the news).

4. This compilation of 150 words is apparently no longer online, but I had pdfs saved. Almost all of the words here come up a lot, but you won't learn many of them in an intro course. I've also compiled my own list of words that I've come across while reading watching tv etc. This might be less helpful, since part of what helped me learn them was that in at least some cases I could remember the original context in which I came across them. But I'd guess that at least 2/3rd of them come up regularly. (Ignore the highlighting - those are just words that took me longer to remember). I also made a totally random list of dutch expressions that I either found idiomatic or grammatically interesting.

5. Here's a pdf of Donald Davidson's "Comprehensive Dutch Grammar", which has more information than you need, but is useful as a reference. I found it especially helpful for its lists of expressions involving verb/preposition pairs (11.21) and for its discussion of the referential 'die' (§8.1.2.5). Basically, any question you might have about grammar is discussed somewhere in here at a very high level.

6. Once it gets relatively easy to understand the news, something slightly harder is Zondag met Lubach, which is available on youtube. It's a comedy news show in the style of The Daily Show. I think it's quite good. Some segments have Dutch subtitles available, which helps. If you have Netflix, Dutch stand up is worth checking out. My sense is that Theo Maassen is the most popular, although if you really want to see something with no non-Dutch equivalent, I'd recommend Jochem Myjers special Even Geduld A.U.B.

7. It took me a while to find a reliable source of Dutch audio. For podcasts, search VPRO. Lately I've been listening to Bureau Buitenland, which updates every weekday and has segments from news all over the world. This may be what's helping my Dutch the most these days. Even once I had a pretty good grasp of the language, it was sometimes hard to switch into a Dutch conversation if I hadn't heard any Dutch for a week. Having something on my iPhone means that I now listen to at least a few minutes most days, which makes a difference. Obviously, this only works at the point where you already have a somewhat good grip on the language. VPRO also has a series of high quality long interviews.

8. Lately I've been obsessed with the book "Wat is Er?" by Martine Pirreault. The entire book is devoted to the different uses of the word "er" and gives lots of opportunities for practice. It might seems like a bit much to have a whole book on this, but I've found that expression using the word er are the most complicated for me to learn, and the thing most standing in the way of my being fully comfortable with the language. The book is all in Dutch, so is probably most useful once you've been learning the language for a while (sources 2 and 5 have useful preliminary discussions of "er") . But at this stage, finding it has been like discovering the answers to all of my lingering questions about colloquial Dutch.