Customer Reviews

Colloquial Dutch: A Complete Language Course (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is perhaps a bit too intense for an introductory text (for that you should try Dutch in Three Months), but if the reader has already studied the language a little and wants a good discussion of some of the subtle nuances of Dutch, this is a good bet. The companion audiocassettes are excellent.

A very good book if you want to learn "real" Dutch. The conversations are more realistic and they use real words that people actually say. It's a good book to learn from if you want to learn Dutch how it's really spoken. I think it's easy to use and understand. Ik hoop dat u hebben een goed tijd lernend van dit boek als ik gedaan!

I've tried many other language/phrase book, and I think the Colloquial Series are the best for beginners who plan to learn and pursue to a higher level.
This book explains every details on grammars and usage...and the cultural points are interesting as well.
The explanations are very clear and you'll find the learning process with colloquial series is very smooth, you'll hardly feel lost...

The audio CD mainly focus on conversations in every chapters, I like it because the native speakers talk as they are in everyday life (kind of fast for beginners), which is good cuz it's realistic...Just listen to it over and over until you're able to understand everything.
The only thing I don't like about the audio CD is that I wish it can provide more recordings on how to pronounce some important phrases rather than just numbers.

Hope you'll enjoy learning w/ this book

Buying this little book is a great way to start learning Dutch. As for the reviewer who said this book is for parrots; it's called "Colloquial Dutch" for a reason! While it's true that this book doesn't offer much of an in depth study of Dutch grammar or linguistics, that doesn't stop it from being a great little primer course that will help you learn Dutch the way the Dutch actually "spreek" it.

I went to Holland in 2005 to study history in Utrecht and I took a Dutch class while I was there. They gave us "Taal Vitaal" books in the class, but I found myself continually referring back to Donaldson's book throughout the course. I simply found it more useful than the Taal Vitaal books.

Dutch people are usually surprised and very appreciative when a non-native speaker makes an earnest effort to learn their language. That being said, one of the most difficult things about learning Dutch in Holland, is that the Dutch tend to start speaking English with you as soon as they find out that you're an English speaker. It's hard, but you have to kind of insist on fumbling around in Dutch. (If you're incredibly inhibited about doing this then try having a few "biertjes" at a pub with some locals.) In the end, whether you like the linguist's approach or the "colloquial" approach, speaking with native speakers and listening to them speak is the single best way to learn a language.

If you're really "serieus" about learning "het nederlands" I would highly recommend that you pick up "201 Dutch Verbs" and "The New Routledge Dutch Dictionary" to augment this book. With these books in hand, you'll be ready to go to Holland!

Once again a course from Routledge that is all but destroyed by a very common error. No wordlists.

For some reason, quite a few of the authors in the Colloquial series seem to be under the false impression that providing English translations of the dialogues is a satisfactory substitute for listing the new words. I disagree 100%. There are no languages that can be translated word by word into English and the result of this is that you end up not knowing which words in Dutch that corresponds to a given English word.

The result of this is that you can memorize the phrases in this book like a parrot, but that won't get you any far and is no better than a much cheaper and more extensive phrasebook. As you're not given the chance to learn and repeat new words, you simply won't be able to construct sentences on your own. It's very disappointing that such a great expert on Dutch as Bruce Donaldson has made such an enormous error and it makes this book very unsuitable for learners. Look for Teach Yourself Dutch instead.

This book has a great deal to offer a beginning learner. The material is very conversational- and very idiomatic- and the subtleties of syntax are well presented. From very early in the course, one has a chance to get used to the idea that the verb must always be the second element of a sentence. For students who learned German first, of course, this isn't new, but as a beginning Dutch learner I reverted readily to old English habits until I started working with this course. Word order in subordinate clauses- another crack in the cement for beginners- also gets covered very well. The accompanying CDs are excellent and almost essential for learning an authentic pronunciation. It is hard to understand, though, why the author did not provide vocabulary lists for each lesson. The sentences in the dialogues (which are often quite entertaining)are translated, of course, but the translation is often pretty idiomatic and it is easy to develop wrong ideas of what individual words mean- or where and how they are used. So get a good dictionary- I recommend the one by Routledge- and keep it by your side.

I'd like to start by saying that obviously you can't rely on a book and a bunch of cd's to learn Dutch [or any language, for that matter]. You have to be a little obsessed and supplement your study with any outside resources you can get your hands on [a native Dutch speaker willing to field your boring questions is also helpful.]

Secondly, I think it's important to debunk the myth that Dutch is so much harder to learn than any other European language. Its phonetic inventory isn't terribly threatening [outside of 'ui' and 'ij/ei' which can take a little practice to get right], though it can be a little grammatically tricky [so can most of the Germanic languages], but sit down with some books on Polish [with three genders, seven inflected cases] or Danish [with an orthography to pronunciation disparity that could make a native English speaker cringe] and you will see how much more difficult it can actually get.

That said, despite Bruce Donaldson being a godsend to English-speaking learners of Dutch and Routledge producing a number of excellent materials to study with, Routledge colloquial courses tend to be a little pricey for their limited scope and have a learn-by-rote tendency that takes the wind out of the course's sails a bit. Dutch, like pretty much any other language, is rife with peculiar idiomatic usage and the 'cut-and-paste these phrases into your inventory' approach is somewhat weak and disappointing. Additionally, this course [and pretty much every other Dutch-learning volume I've come across] has a less than thorough explanation of modal particles, which are pretty much essential to spoken Dutch. All that aside, while this course is hardly a must-have, it is handy for an early intermediate learner.

I hate to see such a great book so poorly reviewed. Mr. Donaldson has a passion and love for his subject that you rarely see. His enthusiasm for Dutch culture is contagious, and indeed, when learning a language, such factors can be the "x-factor", that untouchable, unquantifiable thing that makes learning so much easier. How can a reviewer give one star to a book that he or she has obviously not even tried to use? Luckily, Mr. Donaldson's book on Afrikaans is much more fairly reviewed.

It is totally, absolutely, never-in-a-lifetime possible to learn Dutch from just a book and/or CDs. Period. Full stop.

It is totally, absolutely, never-in-a-lifetime possible to learn Dutch from just a book and/or CDs. Period. Full stop.