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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

My experience traveling to the Netherlands as an English speaker is that people are speaking English, but they're drunk!

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When they seamlessly switch from English to Dutch I feel like I’m having a stroke: all the same intonation, the same accent, but nothing makes sense any more

That doesn't jive with my experience at all. I'm half-dutch, raised in England.

Dutch doesn't have the same intonation, has harsher pronunciations, and has a whole extra sound most English people struggle with (a rolled r).

The older generations also can't pronounce -thew very well as it's not a thing in Dutch, so struggle to pronounce my name, calling me Matchoo instead of Matthew. It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.

The Dutch accent is also extremely noticeable to a native English speaker.

Ultimately, they're not the same at all as English is Germanic/Latin hybrid where half the words are French/Italian words, and half the words are Germanic/Dutch words.

Dutch is not.

You can usually tell by looking at the word and the end of the word.

Words like fantastic, manual, vision, aquatic, consume are all from -ique, -alle, -umme and will have similar words in French/Italian. The tend to be longer words with more syllables.

Words like mother, strong, good, are Germanic in root. The -er, -ong, -od words will all be similar to the German/Dutch words. Shorter, quicker to pronounce.

> It still boggles my mind that my Mum would pick a name the Dutch can't pronounce.

Maybe she meant for you to go by Mathias (or whatever the local equivalent is) when in the Netherlands?

The intonation is different, there are harsher sounds, but there are diphtongs everywhere in Dutch, and to me thisbis what makes it sound like English. French, Spanish, German etc don’t have diphtongs ( or they’re quite rare )

I had a strange experience during one episode of the show "Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the (Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did not recognize it at all.

There's a meme about how Dutch doesn't seem like a serious language to English speakers, and what's funnier is Dutch speakers trying to figure out why it's so funny to English speakers.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/english-to-dutch-translations

As someone who took German in high school, Dutch had my brain flailing for vocabulary to understand but nothing connected.

That's strange (i.e. different from my experience). I've been living in the Netherlands since 2021, speak some (~ B1) Dutch, but good English and German. Dutch language was from day one comprehensible due to German similarity. Many/most words either sound like the German equivalent to the point where you naturally match them in your thought, or they are written (mostly) like the German equivalent.

The connection between Dutch and English languages is far more minimal in comparison. In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.

Written Dutch is fairly easy for me, on the basis of English + native Norwegian + German from school. Spoken Dutch is largely unintelligible for me, on the other hand, unless they speak very slowly.

> In fact, when I first faced the language, I would have said it was a combination of ~80% German, 10% English, 5% French, +5% Others.

But the vocabulary of English itself is majority of Germanic origin. So while Dutch is often closer to the modern German, there's definitely far more than 10% that has a common origin with English as well as German.

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