So you're learning Dutch but you're probably
asking yourself am I doing the right things and am I studying in the most efficient way possible?
I've been learning Dutch now for more than 4 years and in this video I'm going to break down year by
year in detail exactly what I did every resource that I used and which ones I think helped me
the most. Please steal these ideas by all means I hope it will give you some ideas in your language
learning process and also give you the confidence to know that what you're doing is actually going
to work. If that sounds good to you grab something to take some notes and let's get right into it.
Just to give some structure to this video I'm going to be breaking down every year into a few
different categories so I'll be discussing exactly what I did year by year to learn Dutch in terms of
formal learning so courses that I took, apps and websites that I used, podcasts that I listened to,
YouTube channels that I followed, books that I read, and movies and shows that I watched. This video is
just an account of everything that I did so by no means am I saying you need to do all these things
if you want to learn Dutch but maybe it will give you some ideas for things that might work for you
along the way in your process. I think everyone learns differently and if I could go back I would
do some things differently as well. In the future I definitely want to make some videos about mistakes
that I've made along the way and things that I would have done differently so definitely consider
subscribing if that's something you think you'd be interested in. Year one for me was the year 2020
but to be completely fair to the story we actually have to rewind like 4 to 6 months before I moved
to the Netherlands which was somewhere mid 2019 because because this is when I actually started
to learn Dutch. Once I knew for sure that I'd be moving to the Netherlands I wanted to get a bit of
a head start because I knew I'd be moving to the country and I wanted to have some basics before I
got there. At that time there was only one language learning app that I was familiar with and that was
Duolingo. I'd used Duolingo in the past to learn some Spanish for traveling so I was familiar with
the app itself. So like I said I think I started with the Duolingo Dutch course about 4 to 6
months before I actually moved to the Netherlands. I had never studied any Dutch before the only
language that I had ever officially studied was French in school which by the way I cannot speak
anymore which is really, really disheartening but anyway that gave me somewhat of a framework for
learning a language. I think at this point I didn't really have a plan I think I just thought I'm
going to start with the Duolingo Dutch course and see where it takes me. I think I had heard
somewhere that the desktop version of Duolingo was a lot better than the mobile version in terms of
like grammar explanations so I almost exclusively used the desktop version of Duolingo back then
in the beginning. So I started off from the very beginning of the course I didn't skip anything I
started off with grammar topic one and for every single grammar topic that I came across I would
make my own handwritten notes to make sure that I fully understood everything before I would move
on to the next topic. I think conjugation of verbs was the first grammar topic which luckily I was
familiar with from learning French so I knew and understood the import importance of that so I
made my own little handwritten notes on 'hebben' and 'zijn' an and I basically just memorized that right off
of the bat so I slowly went through the beginning of the course this way some days I would do
a few different new grammar lessons and some days I would try to learn multiple grammar topics
at once and other days I would just go through my practice like reviewing the grammar lessons that I
had done in the days before and I actually learned a lot of like basic vocabulary this way just doing
the Duolingo course. The Duolingo grammar lessons back in mid 2019 were not as extensive as I think
they are now so I often had to rely on like online resources and other websites to kind of like
supplement my grammar notes so for this I mainly used the website dutchgrammar.com. To this day
I think this is probably the most comprehensive Dutch grammar resource that's online. Being a big
consumer of YouTube I also found it really helpful to follow along some you YouTube channels to help
me with my understanding of Dutch grammar. At that time my absolute favourite YouTube channel was
Learn Dutch with Neils if I'm not mistaken he's an actual teacher so his explanations of the grammar
were really on point really easy to understand and he gave amazing examples in his videos. The
channel Learn Dutch with Kim was also starting out at that time it's obviously huge now but when
I first started it was just getting up and running. I also found her channel really helpful and
really supported me in my understanding of Dutch grammar and her channel was amazing for my Dutch
comprehension because she speaks really clearly in her videos. But going back to Duolingo the app
back then was obviously a lot different than it is now all of the audio samples were like a very
robotic AI voice and I remember missing stories. So if you've ever done the Duolingo Spanish
course or maybe there are some other courses that have this feature as well but they're like
practice conversations where you see two sides of conversation happening and you sometimes have to
like fill in the next line of the conversation to see if you understood the context of what was
going on. I really liked this feature because it featured really simple vocabulary and things that
you've learned in previous lessons it also gave that feeling of progress in the early stages of
like wow I'm actually understanding what's going on here. Unfortunately the Dutch course didn't
have that but I really was looking for something I could listen to where I could understand
spoken Dutch but it had to be something really for beginners. So I thought listening to podcasts
for Dutch beginners would be a good place to start with my comprehension of Dutch. The first podcast
that I came across was called Dutch Pod 101 this was a good basic first podcast you heard a lot of
like simple conversations like introductions and very easy exchanges and I think this was a great
first podcast to start out with. Eventually that became a little bit repetitive for me and I found
the podcast 'Zeg het in het Nederlands'. This is an excellent, excellent Dutch learning podcast she speaks really
clearly and slowly she doesn't necessarily teach you Dutch grammar but she teaches you about like
Dutch holidays, and culture, traditions and speaks in a way that an absolute beginner can start
to understand Dutch. I would listen to the same episode several times not necessarily on the same
day but I would listen to an episode maybe like four to five times and try to pick up and new
things every single time that I listen to it. So this was like a very active exercise I wasn't
just putting it on in the background I was sitting down trying to understand as much as I could and
writing down the things that I didn't understand so that I could look them up afterwards I
really, really, really highly recommend these beginner podcasts for you if you're in the early
stages of learning Dutch. If you've already learned some basic vocabulary and you know a little
bit and understand the grammar a little bit I think you'd be pleasantly surprised by just
how much you understand when you hear Dutch being spoken in a very slow and controlled way
and this understanding in the beginning is the motivation that I think we all need to keep going
and to keep improving with our Dutch. After a few months of doing everything that I was doing I
decided I wanted to enroll myself in a Dutch course for when I finally was physically in the
Netherlands and because of everything I had been doing I was feeling a little bit confident and
I thought okay maybe I can apply for the A1 to A2 course instead of the A0 to A1 course which
is for absolute complete beginners. So the Dutch school asked me to schedule an intake call with
them and this is just where they like have a quick conversation with you to see if you are enrolling
yourself in the correct level so I had a call with the owner and he spoke of course to me in Dutch
and I had to answer some questions which went okay but I couldn't really respond that well to
the questions where I had to answer in the past tense so he ended up asking me to enroll in the A0 complete beginner course. Okay now we can fast forward to the day I landed at Schiphol because this
is coincidentally also my first day of Dutch in-person classes yes I'm a little bit crazy but
it just so happened that that was the first day of the course and I didn't want to wait like the
few weeks it took for the next round of courses to start. I'm not going to focus too much on the
courses because I know a lot of you are doing this on your own and courses can be extremely expensive
but if you're fortunate enough to have your Dutch courses covered by your work or school like I
was then this information about the courses might come in handy for you. So I was enrolled at Dutch
Courses Amsterdam in Old West which by the way I can highly recommend they were great. This was
a 7-week course with two 2-hour lessons per week and this was in early 2020 so I was physically
going there and doing all of my lessons in person. In my experience the best things about a proper
course are one: the instructor speaks to you in Dutch almost the entire time so you get tons of
practice not only being spoken to but you get to practice trying to respond to someone in Dutch as
well and it's a lot less stress than being out in public and doing it in the wild. Number two: you get
a book or course material so in my case they gave us a binder which was full of material and this
is where all of our grammar lessons and all of our homework came from. They've obviously taught this
level so many times so they know exactly what the foundational grammar topics are and what things
you should be learning at the very beginning so that you can slowly build up over time and
you don't have to figure out yourself what you should be learning as you go along. And number
three: you just get practice speaking with people who are at your level so for me speaking was the
most difficult part of learning Dutch. Speaking to native speakers in stores or at my job in the
first year was just not realistic but I was a lot more comfortable speaking with the people in my
class who were also at my level. Another thing that this course offered was flashcards so part of the
homework was to learn a bunch of different sets of flashcards which they thought were most important
for absolute beginners this included common verbs, basic vocabulary, question words, and common
Dutch phrases or idioms. And they used an app called Quizlet for this so they provided all the
students with ready-made flashcard sets on Quizlet. I really like the flashcard method it's something
that for me really works well and you can always just practice while you're like taking the tram
on the way to work or when you have some downtime it's just really accessible and really easy to
do so aside from going to my weekly lessons I was religiously doing my homework of course using the
app to practice my flashcards and I was listening to as many podcasts like beginner podcasts as I
could with all of my free time so after the A0/A1 course that I took I immediately enrolled myself
in the A1/A2 course because I didn't want to lose out on the momentum that I had going. At this point
I was barely ever speaking Dutch in the real world one thing I did learn to do in Dutch though was
place my order at FEBO which is a like fast food chain that was down the street from where I lived
so I would go there I would place my order in Dutch really proud that would go completely fine
but they would ask me a question in Dutch and I would have to switch to English because I didn't
fully understand and this happened for literally weeks on end until I figured out like like all
of the different possible questions they could ask me which were like, do you want a bag, are you
eating here or is it to go, do you want sauce with your fries, etc etc. So I had to go through that
process for months until I could finally do the entire exchange completely in Dutch. So in the A1/
A2 course I feel like this is where you started to get the actual key grammar that you need to have
like a good basic beginner conversation in Dutch. So the flash cards at this stage were covering
topics for for example like irregular verbs, past tense in both forms, separable verbs (which
absolutely suck), and telling the time for example. I don't remember if it was my teacher at the school
or if it was something I saw online but I got a tip that as I was going through my flashcards
I should practice my verbs in all tenses so if the verb 'blijven' came up or to stay then I would have
to say the well what it meant the infinitive form and then the past tense form so it'd be like
okay I see to stay, 'blijven', 'bleef', 'bleven', 'gebleven'. Yeah I think just really focusing on the most common Dutch verbs
and really practicing those is really actually pretty key at this stage. My Dutch teachers really
recommended us watching as much Dutch television as possible and I'm now also a huge proponent of
this. One of the things they recommended to us in the beginning was the show First Dates so this
is a show which is on NPO 3 I think it's on every single day 5 days a week at 19:25 I watched this
a lot so I still remember and it's just a dating show where people sign up and they basically
get matched with a blind date the entire date is filmed they meet their blind date at the
First Dates restaurant and they have their date and then at the end of the episode they both
sit in front of the camera and they have to say whether or not they want to see the other person
again. This is actually pretty good for beginners because on all these dates you kind of have like
a repetition of the same questions it's like what are your hobbies, do you have family,
where are you from, what do you do for work, where do you live, and coincidentally if you are new in
the Netherlands or Belgium you also will get these questions a lot so it really helps to hear
how people answer them and kind of like just get used to the different possible ways that it can be
asked but beyond that it's just two people having a conversation and for the absolute beginner
that can just be really hard to keep up with and follow. So I did watch a lot of First Dates in
the beginning but if I want to admit to you what was my actual speed in terms of watching Dutch
TV it was 'Nijntje'. Nijntje is the main character of a children's television show in the Netherlands and
I would literally watch episodes of Nijntje and try to transcribe the audio so like try to write down
everything I heard in the episode to practice with my comprehension of spoken Dutch. So what I would do
I would find an episode of Nijntje I would play a few sentences press pause and then I would write down
everything I thought I heard if there were words in there that I didn't know already then I would
have to translate them and figure out what they were in English and then when the few sentences
that I had written down when I completely understood everything there then I would press
play again and keep doing that with another two sentences and go on and and on and on like this. It
sounds like a lot of effort and it was but Nijntje is actually like a show for really young kids so
the episodes that I was watching were about like shapes and colors and and numbers and things like
that so for a beginner like it's actually quite doable and with a show as simple as Nijntje trust
me it won't be long before you can understand like most if not all of the words in a single
episode. Next to that I just stayed consistent on Duolingo doing my daily lessons sometimes if I
was feeling really ambitious I would do like five or 10 lessons in a single day also continuing
to make my grammar notes but other days I would just do my one practice lesson and get it out of
the way now obviously you can get pretty sick of watching kid shows all the time so it was nice
to now and then mix in like some normal shows and movies I watched a bunch in the first year
I'll put them on screen but I won't specifically recommend these ones that I watched I guess in
the sense that I do think they helped me in the grand scheme of things like no matter what Dutch
you're listening to I think it does help with your understanding but it's not like I watched these
in the first year and could follow along by any means without English subtitles. Definitely watch
Dutch shows and movies in the first year with like your native language subtitles to get used to
practicing hearing and understanding Dutch but just pick something that you personally like and
that you can stick with. I did not read any books in my first year but my boyfriend's mom gave me
the book 'Jouw Eerste 1000 Woorden' which is exactly what it sounds like and this was obviously like super
helpful to learn really basic common vocabulary. So Year 2 the year is 2021 and if you remember what
was going on at that time there were no in-person Dutch courses to be found but it had been months
since I had taken my last course and I really wanted to get started on my formal learning again
my co-worker recommended Bart de Pau's Dutch Grammar 2 which is an online video course she had taken
and I decided to look into what it was all about and see if it was something for me it actually
lined up quite well with the level I was at at the time so I decided to invest in that course
and take it from home. So this course focused on future tense, past tense, conjunctions, and the
ever important "er". So I would watch every single video lesson there were more than 40 in the
course I would do all of my homework questions and then for every grammar topic I would write 10 of
my own sentences to show that I understood the topic that was just taught. This process actually
really helped me with my Dutch vocabulary because when you're writing that many sentences and you
have like a limited Dutch vocabulary you actually have to start looking up new words so that you
can make like new fresh sentences. Then I would ask my boyfriend friend who's Dutch by the way to
review my sentences so I could see where all the mistakes I made were and how to correct those. That
course was extremely helpful for me so I decided to go on to take his Dutch Grammar 3 which is the
most advanced grammar course that he offers and it's meant for people who have at least an A2/B1
level just to give an idea of where I was at the time. Now in terms of what I was doing at home I
tried to speak Dutch with my boyfriend as much as possible but honestly it was just pretty
frustrating when I was at this intermediate level like despite the fact that my grammar
understanding was pretty good my vocabulary was okay my speaking was obviously lagging a bit
behind and I think that's pretty normal but it's hard to have an entire relationship this way like
you just end up going back to English most of the time so I started looking into some ways that I
could get the speaking practice in but ideally with someone who had like some professional
experience and could give me some like specific guidance and advice. So then I stumbled upon italki
which is an online platform and there you can find both professional teachers who speak your target
language but you can also find community tutors so these are just people who sign up they speak your
target language and they can help you either just with practicing your speaking or if you have a
specific goal in the target language like taking a specific test in that language and I really
like the platform because because you can find someone on there who charges anywhere from like €5
an hour to €80 an hour so depending on your budget you can really decide who to book a call with
based on what you can afford. So at that point I thought the best way I could invest my money
was to take some conversation practice calls on italki and really get that like speaking
practice in with a real native speaker and get like personalized feedback from them. I tried
a few different teachers and formats but what I what I ended up finding was that a 30 minute call
once per week was a good rhythm for me and I did this around like 10 to 15 times so I think like
around 10 to 15 weeks in total. It might not sound like a lot but I have to say this really really
helped my spoken Dutch because I wasn't at the point then when I was speaking Dutch at work so
I wasn't getting a ton of conversation practice in but after these 10 to 15 italki conversation
practice calls I really felt like my spoken Dutch had gotten a boost. One of the tutors that I used
used the textbook 'Zichtbaar Nederlands' which is this book right here and I can really, really highly
recommend this book if you're at the A2/B1 level it has really nice grammar explanations nice
illustrations nice tables so it's really easy to follow along and coincidentally I actually
had bought that book before I even started taking the conversation lessons on italki because
my co-worker had recommended it to me and she also found it really great. In the meantime I was
reading some very, very easy Dutch books to help with my comprehension. One of the books I read at
the time was called 'Ik ben ook op jou' by Jacques Vriens which is a book meant for children I think aged seven and
up any book I would read I would do with my Dutch English dictionary by my side so any word that
I didn't know I would look up right away and I would write it down by hand in my little notebook
because personally this really helped me remember the words for next time. At this time I was still
really regularly watching Learn Dutch with Kim for the grammar topics that I needed some assistance
with and I got more into vlogs around this time so I really liked the vlogs of Elise Boers, Vita Cleo,
Teske and Monica Geuze and in terms of more like comedy entertainment videos I really liked Rijk Hofman for
this. I wasn't it wasn't so much of like an active exercise like the Nijntje episodes where I would
try to transcribe anything or write anything down it was more just to like actively listen and
get practice with my understanding and actually I still love all of these channels with the
exception of Monica Geuze she doesn't post vlogs anymore but I still watch all of these channels to
this day. So in year 2 this was actually the year I started to move away from beginner Learn Dutch
podcast to like normal Dutch podcasts which are meant for Dutch speaking people in general the one
that seemed to stick for me was a podcast called 'Marc Marie en Aaf Vinden Iets' you won't be able to
find this exact podcast anymore because he Marc Marie that is he now has a new co-host so if you
want to check this podcast out you have to search for 'Marc Marie en Isa Vinden Iets' and the reason
I loved this podcast is because they just talk about like ridiculously simple topics I mean like
cats, flowers, Germany, the supermarket like really basic things that everyone knows about then they
just talk about like the dos and don'ts if they have like a funny anecdote around that topic and
then at the end they give it a rating out of five. Then there's also 'NOS Jeugdjournaal' which is like a
news podcast for kids between 9 and 12 it's been around for like more than 35 years and obviously
because of the target age group that they make the podcast for it's also quite good for beginner
intermediate Dutch speakers as well this one also is about relatively simple topics like taking
tests at school, or eating vegetables so even if you don't understand every single word you
hear you can more or less follow along with the conversation. I also discovered the app Memrise
in my second year which was really nice to switch things up from Duolingo which I was still
doing every single day at that point I mainly studied the Dutch 5 Dutch 6 and Dutch 7 courses
which are available on the free version of the Memrise app. I actually don't think at that point
I was learning any new grammar not to say that there was not more grammar for me to learn but I
had learned everything that I felt was important for me to have like a basic conversation at the
intermediate upper intermediate level and I didn't feel like learning more complex grammar would
necessarily be of value for me at that point so Memrise for me was just kind of like a new tool
which helped me break free from the like monotony of Duolingo every day and I did learn some new
vocabulary and some new Dutch phrases and idioms and when you do use the same method every single
day you can yeah get pretty fatigued by that so it was really nice to switch things up year
three so in year three I was getting a lot more confident in my abilities to speak and understand
Dutch at work I was attending meetings that were fully spoken in Dutch I would usually respond in
English when I was asked question because while my like at home Dutch was getting pretty good
I didn't have all the necessary technical terms that I needed to have a conversation at work
about work I would say in a meeting like a work meeting I would understand like around 80% of what
everyone was saying. One thing that I did at work which I think was really, really key is I had some
speaking partners at work who I would only speak Dutch with so I had a lot of co-workers that I
spoke English with but there were some people who were clearly way more comfortable speaking Dutch
and I kind of gravitated towards those people to be my Dutch speaking partners. For the record
I never went into work and was like hey guys I'm speaking Dutch from now on because that's totally
not my thing but finding these people who are more comfortable in Dutch was like the perfect
solution for me because they were also very happy to help me practice. Towards the end of year three
I was reading books for kids aged like 9, 10, 11 so growing up I really loved the books of Roald Dahl
like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches so I really gravitated towards
those books in Dutch because I already knew the story line so I knew if I read them in Dutch that
I would at least kind of know what was going on if I didn't understand every single word so that year
I read some Roald Dahl books I read Matilda and I read 'Daantje de wereldkampioen'. Don't get me wrong
I was not reading these books with ease I was still reading with my dictionary at hand looking
up every single word I didn't know what's a bit of a shame is that a lot of those books have
a lot of old language in them so like a lot of old Dutch which is not as commonly used anymore I
specifically remember reading 'Daantje de wereldkampioen' on a long car ride with my boyfriend and
his family and that was really convenient because if I didn't know a word I could just ask everyone
in the car what the word meant but I specifically remember there being many words where I would ask
and they would say oh but that's like a really old word no one uses that anymore or sometimes
they wouldn't even really know the word themselves I'm personally not so interested in learning those
words that I'm never going to use or that no one else uses so I basically just like forgot those
like didn't write them down in my notebook and just moved on to the next one. In terms of what I
watched in that third year that actually brings up a really fun kind of challenge that I had in year
three which ended up being like a huge project in learning Dutch. In the Netherlands you occasionally
come across a show or movie on Netflix which does not have English subtitles that ended up being the
case for the show The Bridge which is a Swedish drama series with four seasons. My boyfriend and
I were recommended this show many, many times and it's only spoken in Swedish and Danish but there
were no English subtitles there were only Dutch subtitles and I didn't want to not watch the show
so this ended up being a four season long process of reading Dutch subtitles and trying to
figure out this show it was actually a success I have to say I'm pretty proud of myself like I
obviously couldn't understand everything because the show follows around two detectives who are
always like busy trying to solve like these really complex cases so in terms of terminology there
were plenty of things that I didn't understand right off the bat but overall it was a success I'm
actually pleasantly surprised by how well it went. By the way loved that show highly recommend. Okay
that takes us to 2023 year 4 I started a new job and on the first day my boss asked me whether we
would be doing the training in English or Dutch I obviously said Dutch and because of that I
honestly think this moment was the cause for a huge leap in my Dutch over the next year from
that moment on I've done my best to speak Dutch to my co-workers and my clients of course it
doesn't always go according to to plan but it gets so much easier the more I'm exposed to
all the vocabulary the hardest part for me was getting used to the technical vocabulary because
I work as an accountant and finance and accounting is just not really something I talk about in my
daily life so I didn't have the vocab but I was lucky enough to be offered 10 private lessons in
business Dutch so in professional communication writing emails in Dutch and this kind of thing
and this turned out to be super valuable for me for this we used the textbook 'Nederlands op Niveau'. I
think I'm just really lucky because for eight or more hours a day I'm constantly exposed to the
language and terminology that I'm trying to learn and I try to get as much out of that as possible
like I know some people will try to block it out I'm honestly sitting there I'm doing the complete
opposite I'm a very active listener when I'm at the office I'm listening to how people start and
end their phone calls I'm listening to the words they use most often I always have DeepL open
somewhere in the background in a tab so that I can quickly translate a word that I hear in the
background at this point when my co-workers use some like obscure or funny Dutch word they always
ask me if I know it because I've told them before that I learn at least one or two new Dutch words
a day at the office so they're also on the lookout for like oh what's what's the what's your Dutch
word of the day going to be today. This is honestly where I learned the Dutch that I could never learn
from a course it's the Dutch that people are just using amongst each other every single day not
what you learn from a book. I'm still regularly following like all the channels that I watched two
years ago when I was learning Dutch and obviously that's not because I want to practice my Dutch
anymore it's just become part of my routine on the other hand I I do think it still has a
positive impact on my Dutch. Probably one of my proudest moments last year was in May of last
year when I attended the stand-up comedy show of Daniel Arends in Utrecht his show was called 'Thuis praat ik bijna nooit'. The fact that I could sit there with like 800 other people laughing my ass off to this comedian who was
speaking Dutch was like just the craziest most remarkable feeling ever. Honestly with learning
Dutch I just constantly have these moments of like wow I'm understanding all this or woah I just
did that entire client call in Dutch. After 4 years I still amazed myself with the fact that I can
communicate with people in this language which 10 years ago I'm not even sure I knew what it sounded
like. This year I changed my Dutch proficiency on LinkedIn from limited working proficiency to
professional working proficiency so this is how I've assessed myself at this point year five
in my learning. Now Duolingo has been on the list every year so far and that is also 100% correct
I've used Duolingo since the very beginning of my Dutch learning journey and I'm still using
it every single day in the beginning it looked a lot different than it does now like back then I
was doing my own notes on the grammar lessons and doing multiple lessons a day nowadays I just do a
practice lesson to keep up my streak to be honest it doesn't have anything to do with learning Dutch
anymore it's just about keeping up like a daily habit around Dutch for me one day I'll reveal my
streak in a video because I have to admit it's pretty wild. I still have so much to learn when
it comes to Dutch but I plan on staying in the Netherlands so technically I have the rest of my
life to continue practicing and I intend to do so. I'm just going to keep speaking every single
day and watching tons of Dutch content because that was obviously key in my ability to learn
Dutch. If you haven't found some Dutch YouTube channels that you love yet you need to do that
ASAP because it's going to do wonders for your Dutch. If you don't know where to start check out
this video next for my guide to Dutch YouTube.
