Toekomstige tijd

taken from Nederlands in Uitvoering

Yesterday, Mandy told me: "I have no idea how to write [in the past tense], or the future tense, so I mostly just stick with the present for now".

The past tense in Dutch needs some more explanation, but the future tense is failry easy:

'ei' or 'ij'

an egg or an ice cream?

Another confusing beauty in the Dutch language: do I write 'ei' or 'ij'?

Both sound exactly the same, but it is extremely important to use the correct written form in order to avoid confusion. There are no 'rules' or 'mnemonics' for it, you will just have to study it, word for word. Undust does dictionaries and unfold those bookworm-glasses!

"kunnen" vs "mogen"

Illustration taken from Nandita

Three days ago, Mandy asked: "about the difference between 'kun' and 'kan', and when you use those or when you use 'mag'".

Which is a great question!

geen - niet

Illustration taken
from MathGoodies

Negation in a Dutch sentence can happen in two simple ways: by using the word "niet", or by using the word "geen".

Always use the word "niet", except when it is a noun that you want to negate in the sentence.

"je gaat" vs "ga je"

Conjugating a verb in Dutch is not too difficult, but you will need to understand the following principals: find the stem of the verb, that will be the first person singular, add a 't' to it to get the second and third person singular and add 'en' to the stem to get all the plural forms.

Let's take an easy one: werken (put your mouse on top of the word to see the translation)

werken	voorbeeld
ik werk	ik werk als receptionist
jij/je werkt	jij werkt thuis
hij/zij/het werkt	Mark? Hij werkt vandaag niet.
wij werken	wij werken op het postkantoor
jullie werken	Dag collega's, jullie werken hard!
zij werken	Jan en Bart, zij werken op maandag

Samengestelde woorden

Illustration taken from Wikimedia

Combined words, a very interesting topic. Unlike in English, the Dutch language requires that combined words are written as one word. It is a very common mistake, also amongst native speakers. It occurs so frequently that in 2004, people have built a website that collects examples of this kind of mistakes.

Illustration taken from SOS

A good example is a website that promotes perfumes. You can choose between "scents for ladies" and "scents for gentlemen". In Dutch, this should be: "damesgeuren" and "herengeuren", both written as one word as it is a combination of the words "ladies" and "scents". Unfortunately, the website has put a separation between both parts of the combined word, not realising that "dames geuren" can be read as if 'geuren' is a verb, changing the meaning to "ladies smell (bad)" and "gentlemen smell (bad)".

Not really the image that you would expect from perfumesellers, this smells...

Het geslacht van zelfstandige naamwoorden

Illustration taken
from SLRevolution

Although I have only been a Livemocha-user shortly (*), I have noticed that Dutch learners have troubles with defining the gender of nouns in Dutch. This is quite a hurdle in the road of mastering the Dutch language and even native speakers make mistakes regarding this one, but the solution is simple: use a dictionary. I recommend to use Van Dale (also for Linux users) or the Wiktionary.

Now, why is this so important?