Customer Reviews

Beginner's Dutch (Dutch Edition)

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The book was first published in 1941 and the foreward indicates that it was created as a teaching guide to teach employees of firms that had branches in the Netherlands and 'Dutch East Indies'. Although the spelling was updated, some 'old-fashioned' expressions made it passed the editor's pen. This book MIGHT be useful as a teacher's resource to use with students as it contains lots of dictation and reading passages. However, care must be taken because the 'old-fashioned' expressions might lead to, at minimum, confusion, at worst, laughter, from a native Dutch speaker. That is what happened to me. My interest in learning Dutch has been so that I can communicate via e-mail to friends, and visit Dutch web sites. This was about the third such book that I had bought and just happened to take it along on a visit to the Netherlands when visiting friends. I had bought it specifically for the reading passages. On at least 4 occasions my Dutch friend laughed in complete disbelief at how a passage had been written and warned me not to rely on the book as an authority. Best used by a teacher of Dutch looking for some 'Dictation and reading passsages' to augment their own already written course material. Or a student that just wants extra reading material and the challenge of finding the 'old-fashioned' expressions.

Regarding the fact that the number of books on Dutch is quite limited this volume is a nice introduction to the written Dutch. This book is defenitely not for people looking for modern Dutch slang or basic traveler's phrases. It does not have any dialogs and represents a classic method of teaching a foreign language. Each lesson contains a text or two that are comparatively long right from the start. Each lesson gives a little portion of grammar and a few exercises that are basically translations and compositions. Every lesson has a vocabulary. There are also English-Dutch and Dutch-English vocabularies at the end of the book. Some lessons contain reading passages from the adventures of Baron van Münchhausen and from tales by Hans Anderson. I find this approach very interesting and valuable. The last two lessons have fragments from original Dutch newspapers. Although both articles were printed in the 30s (remember the book was first published in 1941), they are still inetersting to read. The list of nature vocabulary (names of plants and animals) makes the book especially valuable for learnes with scientific interests. Also, the book has some nice pictures illustrating the reading passages. The basic disadvantage of the book is its phonetic appendix that concentrates on vowels only. The transcription of the two texts given in it does not always correspond to what I've seen in other books. In case of selfstudy, this book would be a good tool for students with some language learning experience, especially good for those who know some German or Danish.

This book is so far proving to be a very good 'brush-up' review for me who learned Dutch 55 years ago from a similar book plus living and working in Holland for a year. I had not spoken, heard, or read the language since then and had forgotten 99% of it. I would think it could also be very helpful for a true beginner.