English words, German grammar

Dutch borrows the comfort of English vocabulary and the architecture of German grammar, and the second is what catches people who were lulled by the first.

There are two words for the, and no rule that will tell you which. De covers most nouns and het covers the rest — de fiets, the bike, but het huis, the house. Every word that has been made small with -tje takes het, which is the one reliable rule, and beyond that it is memory. People who have lived here twenty years still get it wrong, and everybody understands them anyway.

The verb moves. In a plain sentence it comes second, which sometimes means second after the time rather than after the person: Morgen ga ik naar Amsterdam — tomorrow go I to Amsterdam. Add a second verb and it goes to the end: Ik wil morgen naar Amsterdam gaan. Many verbs split in half, with the front part sent to the end of the sentence: opbellen, to phone, becomes Ik bel je morgen op. The meaning of a sentence often arrives in its last word, so listen to the end before you answer.

The false friends are worst exactly where the words look most English. Bellen is to phone. Slim means clever, not thin. Brutaal means cheeky, not brutal — a child can be brutaal. Eventueel means possibly, raar means strange, door means through, and groot means big, never great. And lekker, which you will hear twenty times a day, starts at delicious and spreads to anything good: lekker weer is nice weather, lekker slapen is sleeping well, and lekker! on its own is roughly nice one.

Easy to read, hard to hear

An English speaker looking at a Dutch sign has the strange sense of almost reading it. Water is water, appel is apple, melk is milk, boek is book, and a good third of a menu can be guessed on sight. That is not an illusion: Dutch sits between English and German on the family tree, closer to both than either is to the other. The ear is a different story. Spoken Dutch swallows its endings and its vowels went somewhere English never followed, so huis looks like house and sounds nothing like it. The practical rule follows: read first, listen second, and let the written word tell you what the spoken one was.

Say the place names the Dutch way and the rest follows. Gouda, the town and the cheese, is not GOO-da but roughly KHOW-dah, with the throat scrape this panel teaches and an ow where English expects oo. Leiden is LIE-dun, Utrecht is UU-trekht, and the seaside district of The Hague, Scheveningen, is so hard for outsiders — s, then the scrape, then three soft syllables — that it is the country's best-known shibboleth. Nobody expects you to get it right. Trying it aloud in a tram is a reliable way to make a Dutch person smile.

Six things that catch visitors out

At a birthday, congratulate everyone. A Dutch birthday party often begins as a circle of chairs in a living room, and the arriving guest goes round the circle shaking every hand and saying gefeliciteerd — congratulations — not only to the person whose birthday it is but to their partner, their parents and their friends: gefeliciteerd met je zus, congratulations on your sister. It sounds absurd the first time and is entirely sincere.

Paying separately is normal and nobody is offended. Splitting a bill exactly, down to who had the extra drink, is ordinary rather than mean. Among friends the bill is often paid by one person, who then sends everyone else a payment request on their phone through an app called Tikkie; if a Dutch friend says they will send you a Tikkie, that is what it means, and it is good manners to pay it the same day.

Social life lives in the diary. Dutch people plan dinners, coffees and visits weeks ahead and write them down, and dropping in unannounced — especially around six, when dinner is on the table — is rare. If a Dutch acquaintance pulls out a phone to fix a date three weeks away, they are being friendly, not putting you off.

Open curtains are not an invitation to look in. Many Dutch homes leave their front windows uncurtained in the evening, lamps on and living room on full view, a habit often traced to an old idea that a household with nothing to hide hides nothing. Walking past, the polite thing is not to stare, however much you want to.

Pack for the stairs. The narrow canal houses of Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht have staircases so steep they are closer to ladders, and the hook on the beam at the top of the façade is still how furniture goes in — through the window. In a canal-house hotel or a rented flat, a single suitcase you can carry up a ladder one-handed is worth more than any packing list.

Coffee comes with one biscuit, and that is the custom, not a slight. Visit a Dutch home and the first thing offered is coffee, and in many households a tin of biscuits goes round once and goes back in the cupboard. The Dutch joke about it themselves. Take one, say lekker, and do not reach for the tin again unless it is offered.

The country that answers you in English

The Netherlands comes at or near the top of every international ranking of English as a second language, and the reason is the same one that explains Spain's place near the bottom: here, foreign films and television are subtitled rather than dubbed, so children grow up hearing English every evening. The practical result is that almost anyone under sixty in a city will switch to English the moment your accent appears, often mid-sentence and without being asked. It is meant as courtesy and efficiency, not as a comment on your Dutch.

So why bother? Because the greeting still matters — a goedemorgen on entering a shop is noticed — and because the written country is Dutch even where the spoken one is not. Supermarket labels, the parking machine, the letter from your landlord, the pharmacy leaflet and the screen that tells you your train is not coming are all in Dutch first. A few words do most of that work: storing, a disruption; vertraging, a delay; spoor, the platform; uitgang, the exit; let op, watch out; gesloten, closed.

If you want to keep a conversation in Dutch, say so at the start: Ik oefen mijn Nederlands, I'm practising my Dutch. Most people will happily slow down and stay in Dutch for you, and some will go out of their way to — though the same directness that makes them switch will also make them correct you, plainly and without malice, which is the fastest free lesson you will ever get.

First names from the first handshake

The line between u and je is real, but the country leans so far towards informality that visitors mostly meet je. Behind it sits a deeply held dislike of putting on airs. The Dutch saying doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg — just act normal, that's crazy enough — is quoted half as a joke and lived in full. Managers cycle to the office, a prime minister cycling to meet the king made news abroad and none at home, and showing off your money, rank or title is the fastest way to lose a Dutch room.

Say your own name when you shake hands. Where an English speaker says nice to meet you, a Dutch person grips your hand, looks you in the eye and says their first name — Sanne, Joost — and expects yours back. First names start there, at work as much as anywhere, and calling a colleague meneer or mevrouw after the first meeting reads as cold rather than polite.

Among friends and family the greeting is three kisses on alternating cheeks, right, left, right; between strangers, and with anyone you have just met, it is a handshake. Do not lead with the kisses — wait to be offered them, the same way you would wait to be offered the informal je by somebody much older.

One word does half the politeness. Alsjeblieft — alstublieft in the formal version — means please, but it is also what you say when you hand something over, the way English says here you go. Every shopkeeper who passes you your change says it, and you say it back when you pass over your card. Thanks is dank je wel, or dank u wel to someone older, and the reply is graag gedaan, gladly done.

Above the rivers and below them

For a country you can cross by train in about three hours, the Netherlands carries a surprising number of internal borders. The oldest runs along its great rivers, the Rhine, the Waal and the Maas. The Dutch still speak of boven de rivieren and onder de rivieren, above and below them, and mean something real by it: the north historically Protestant and sober, the south Catholic, warmer and, in the Dutch word for it, Bourgondisch — Burgundian, meaning fond of long meals and a second glass.

Below the rivers, in Brabant and Limburg, you will hear the soft g, a gentler, lisping version of the throat scrape this kit teaches, and you will find the country's carnival. In February whole cities stop for it; 's-Hertogenbosch renames itself Oeteldonk for the week. In Limburg, squeezed between Belgium and Germany, the local dialects even use tone the way Swedish does, and Maastricht feels closer to Liège than to Amsterdam.

The west is the Randstad, the ring of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht that holds most of the people and money. Amsterdam is the capital but the government sits in The Hague, an arrangement the Dutch find entirely normal. Amsterdam and Rotterdam regard each other with the rivalry of two port cities, summed up in the old line that money is earned in Rotterdam, shared out in The Hague and spent in Amsterdam — and their football clubs, Ajax and Feyenoord, carry the rivalry with less humour.

In the north is Friesland, with its own language, Frisian, official there alongside Dutch and on every road sign. It is the closest living relative of English, close enough to produce a famous rhyme: bûter, brea en griene tsiis — butter, bread and green cheese — said nearly the same in English and in Frisian. Further east, in Groningen, the greeting is simply moi, at any hour.

Netherlands, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Almost anything can take the diminutive ending -je: a beer becomes a biertje and a chat a praatje, and it softens the sentence rather than shrinking what it describes.
• The Hague's formal name, 's-Gravenhage, means the count's hedge, after the medieval hunting estate the city grew around, and that leading apostrophe is all that survives of des, meaning of the.
• Carnaval takes over the south for days, as towns in Limburg and Noord-Brabant crown a carnival prince, adopt nicknames for the week and fill the streets with brass bands.
• Amsterdam's exchange, opened in 1602 for shares in the East India Company, is generally counted as the first place where company stock was traded continuously.
• At a Dutch birthday the chairs go in a circle and guests congratulate not only the birthday person but their parents, partner and siblings as well.
• Antoni van Leeuwenhoek ground his own lenses in Delft in the 1670s and became the first person to see bacteria, which he called animalcules.
• Colonies of harbour and grey seals haul out on the sandbanks around Texel and the other Wadden islands, in plain sight of the passing ferries.
• Uitwaaien means going out into the wind on purpose — a walk on a blustery beach or dyke taken precisely because the weather will blow your head clear.
• Dutch glues words together without spaces, so a single noun can carry a whole clause; even a roadside sign may read snelheidsbeperking, speed limitation.
• Drop is liquorice flavoured with salmiak, or ammonium chloride, and it fills a wall of any supermarket in shapes and strengths from soft and sweet to bracingly salty.
• A new baby is welcomed with beschuit met muisjes, a crisp rusk spread with butter and scattered with aniseed comfits in pink or blue, and in orange when a royal child is born.
• Philips of Eindhoven launched the compact cassette in 1963 and licensed the format freely, then developed the compact disc with Sony two decades later.
• Lightly brined raw herring is sold from street stalls as Hollandse Nieuwe, eaten with chopped raw onion and pickles when the new season's catch comes in.
• The stroopwafel was born in Gouda: two wafer-thin rounds of batter pressed together around a layer of warm caramel syrup, and locals rest one on a hot mug so the middle goes soft.
• Lekker stretches far past food: the weather can be lekker, so can a nap, a chair or a long swim, and the word simply means this is doing me good.
• The national team plays in orange, and the Dutch sides of the 1970s gave football Total Football, in which every outfield player is expected to cover every role.
• There are more bicycles in the country than there are people, and railway stations have multi-storey bike parks holding thousands apiece.
• This is the delta where the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt all reach the North Sea, which is why so much of the map is water, island and river arm.
• Amsterdam and Rotterdam are named after dams, one built across the river Amstel and the other across the Rotte, with the settlement growing on the bank behind it.
• Gouda cheese is named for the town where it was weighed and traded rather than made, and the seventeenth-century weigh house still stands on the market square.
• Nineteen windmills stand in a row at Kinderdijk, built in the eighteenth century to pump water off the polder, and their sails still turn.
• Oliebollen, deep-fried dough balls dusted with icing sugar, are the sweet of New Year's Eve, sold from stalls that appear on street corners every December.
• Canal houses are narrow because the old property tax was levied on frontage width, so they grew tall and deep instead, with a hoisting beam at the gable for lifting furniture in through the windows.
• On the evening of 11 November children go from door to door with lanterns they have made themselves, singing short Sint Maarten songs in exchange for sweets.
• Flower auctions here run on a descending clock: the price starts high and drops until a buyer stops it, which is why the method is known everywhere as a Dutch auction.
• Fierljeppen is a Frisian sport in which competitors sprint at a canal, grab a tall pole and climb it as it topples, trying to land on the far bank.
• Schiphol airport stands roughly four metres below sea level on the floor of the Haarlemmermeer, a lake pumped dry by steam engines in the middle of the nineteenth century.
• The highest hill on the Dutch mainland, the Vaalserberg, reaches 322 metres, while the Kingdom's true summit is Mount Scenery on the Caribbean island of Saba.
• Height across much of Europe is reckoned from NAP, the Amsterdam Ordnance Datum, a zero level fixed from the water in Amsterdam's harbour centuries ago.
• English borrowed much of its seafaring vocabulary from Dutch, with yacht from jacht, skipper from schipper, and deck, dock, freight and cruise all crossing over.
• Chips arrive in a paper cone under a thick spoonful of mayonnaise, and asking for patatje oorlog, literally war chips, buries them further under spiced peanut sauce and raw onion.
• Tulips are not native: the bulbs arrived from Ottoman lands in the sixteenth century and took so well to the sandy soil behind the dunes that the fields now stripe the spring landscape.
• Limburg bakes vlaai, a wide flat fruit pie on a yeasted base, cut into generous wedges and brought out whenever there is anything at all to celebrate.
• Johannes Vermeer left only around thirty-five known paintings, most of them quiet interiors lit from a window on the left, and he spent his entire life in Delft.
• Front curtains are often left open in the evening, and walking past a lit living room is treated as perfectly ordinary rather than nosy.
• New Zealand takes its name from the Dutch province of Zeeland, and Tasmania from Abel Tasman, the navigator who charted both coasts in the 1640s.
• The Elfstedentocht is a skating race along frozen canals past eleven Frisian towns, and it can only be held in a winter cold enough to thicken the ice the whole way round.
• Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock in 1656 and discovered Saturn's moon Titan, cutting timekeeping error from minutes a day to seconds.
• Bitterballen are crisp breadcrumbed spheres of slow-cooked beef ragout, served with a blob of mustard alongside a beer at the borrel, the after-work drink.
• Stamppot is potato mashed together with a second vegetable — kale for boerenkool, endive for andijvie — and served with a sausage pressed into a well of gravy.
• The letters IJ behave as a single unit in Dutch, so when a word beginning with them is capitalised both letters go up, which is why it is IJsselmeer and IJmuiden.
• Thick split pea soup is called snert, and the traditional test of a good pot is whether a spoon will stand upright in it; a smoked rookworst sausage goes in alongside.
• At low tide the Wadden Sea drains into miles of gleaming mudflat, and wadlopen — guided walking across the exposed seabed to the islands — is a recognised pastime.
• Gezellig covers warmth, good company and a room that simply feels right; a cafe, an evening or a person can all be gezellig, and none of it translates cleanly.
• The earliest known patent application for a telescope was filed in 1608 by Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle maker in Middelburg.
• Poffertjes are thumb-sized pancakes raised with yeast and buckwheat flour, cooked in a dimpled iron pan and buried under icing sugar and a melting knob of butter.
• Hagelslag is a shower of chocolate sprinkles poured over buttered bread at breakfast, and the name translates literally as hailstorm.
• Jenever, the juniper spirit that English turned into gin, is poured to the very brim of a tulip-shaped glass, so the first sip is taken bending down with hands behind the back.
• Cookie comes from the Dutch koekje, little cake, and coleslaw from koolsla, cabbage salad; both reached English through Dutch settlers in North America.
• Roughly a quarter of the country lies below sea level, and much of the rest sits low enough to flood without the dykes, dunes and pumping stations that hold the water off.
• Voorpret is the fun you have before the fun: the pleasure of planning a trip or counting down to a party, treated as a real part of the enjoyment.
• Koningsdag on 27 April turns the whole country orange, and for that one day anyone may sell their old things on the pavement at the vrijmarkt without a licence.
• The Afsluitdijk is a 32-kilometre dam that closed off the Zuiderzee, turning a saltwater bay into the freshwater lake now called the IJsselmeer.
• De Hoge Veluwe national park keeps a fleet of white bicycles free for anyone to take at the gate, ride across the heath and leave at another rack.
• A birthday calendar hanging on the back of the toilet door is a genuine national habit, listing everyone's dates so that nobody gets forgotten.
• The waterschappen, or water boards, have managed dykes and drainage since the 1200s and still hold their own elections, making them among the oldest elected bodies anywhere.
• Giethoorn is threaded with canals and arched footbridges instead of streets, so much of the village is reached by boat, some of them punted quietly along.
• Python, one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, was written by the Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum, who released the first version in 1991.
• Santa Claus reached English through Dutch, from Sinterklaas, the feast-day figure who visits on 5 December and was carried to New York by Dutch settlers.
• Delftware, blue painted onto white tin-glazed earthenware, began as a local answer to imported Chinese porcelain, and Delft potteries have kept at it ever since.