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Learn how to speak Dutch
The Dutch language is a West
Germanic language that is spoken by around 24 million people
as a first language—including the population of the
Netherlands and about sixty percent that of Belgium—and by
another 5 million as a second language. It is the third most
widely spoken Germanic language, after English and German.
Outside the Low Countries, it is the native language of the
majority of the population of Suriname, and also holds
official status in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which
are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Historical minorities on the verge of extinction remain in
parts of France and Germany, and in Indonesia, while up to
half a million native speakers may reside in the United
States, Canada and Australia combined. The Cape Dutch
dialects of Southern Africa have evolved into Afrikaans, a
mutually intelligible daughter language which is spoken to
some degree by at least 16 million people, mainly in South
Africa and Namibia.
Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and
English and is colloquially said to be "roughly in between"
them. Dutch, like English, has not undergone the High German
consonant shift, does not use Germanic umlaut as a
grammatical marker, has largely abandoned the use of the
subjunctive, and has leveled much of its morphology,
including most of its case system. Features shared with
German include the survival of three grammatical
genders—albeit with few grammatical consequences—as well as
the use of modal particles, final-obstruent devoicing, and a
similar word order. Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and
incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far
fewer than English.
This foreign
language course was developed by groups commissioned by the
government. It is meant to be used as a crash course in
a foreign language for basic conversational ability by a
foreign traveler or diplomat. It is an introductory
course meant for beginners and includes basic conversational
language by native speakers.
This course
consists of a basic introduction to Dutch, with text and
audio files.
There are
105 lessons in mp3 format, with 8 student texts in PDF
format totaling about 1560 pages. Adobe Reader is
required to view the PDF files, while the mp3 files can be
listened to by any audio player on your PC.
Total run
time of course: 37 hours, 50 minutes, and 35 seconds.
A must have resource for any foreign traveler!
Notice:
Please note, this disk is only for use in your computer's
drive! It will NOT play in the DVD Player hooked up to
your TV or the CD player in your car!
This is a CD-ROM disk, so you need a CD-ROM drive on your PC
to play it.
This disk contains this
foreign language course in MP3 format. This is not for
use in your CD player, it is not for your DVD player, even
if they play MP3 disks. This disk is only formatted to
be opened in your computer. You have to insert this
disk in your PC, click on "My Computer" and click on the
disk to open the files. You can copy the MP3 files to
your PC, and then load them on to any MP3 player of your
choice. Please note: that if you try to
play this disk on anything other than your computer, it
won't work! |
