Difficulties learning another language

[audreyh1]

It's not about pronunciation, it's about the words themselves to get to comprehension. I would never ever try to actually talk to somebody in Dutch/Flemish as I can't understand a thing. Long live cognates!

My experience with written Dutch was simply that until I could pronounce the written words I failed to recognize the enormous number of shared common words.

 

[big-papa]

My experience with written Dutch was simply that until I could pronounce the written words I failed to recognize the enormous number of shared common words.

To be honest, I recognize more German cognates in Dutch than I do English cognates. For example, once you undestand that AA in Dutch is the same as an umlauted A in German (as well as other constructs), then it clicks.

On a side note, I also travel to the Czech Republic a lot. I'm pretty sure that whoever came up with the Czech language didn't want it to have too many vowels, so I think they gave them away to the Dutch language.

 

[audreyh1]

Yeah, probably! Lots of vowels in Dutch. Maybe it makes up for their difficult pronounciation of the g which takes quite a while to even get close. DH makes a joke about needing a phlegm reservoir to speak Dutch.