Learn Dutch through English
Learn Nederlands through English
Every lesson explains Dutch by comparing it directly to English grammar and vocabulary — word order, case marking, formal speech, and more — instead of translating through English.
All Lessons
Greetings & Formality
Greetings & Formality
Dutch splits 'you' into je/jij (informal) and u (formal) — a distinction English used to have and lost, much like German's du/Sie split. Master this before any other vocabulary.
Alphabet & Pronunciation
Alphabet & Pronunciation
Dutch is written with the Latin alphabet plus the digraph ij, which behaves almost like its own letter — English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, but Dutch follows its own rules far more reliably once you learn them.
Numbers 1–10
Numbers 1–10
Dutch numbers 1–10 are simple standalone words, just like English's own one–ten — no compounding to worry about yet. That starts at eleven, covered in the next numbers lesson.
Family
Family
Dutch grammatical gender doesn't track a person's actual sex at all, unlike English's natural-gender pronouns he/she — family words for people are grammatically 'common gender' regardless of who they refer to.
Articles & Gender (de/het)
Articles & Gender (de/het)
Dutch nouns split into two grammatical genders — common (de) and neuter (het) — a system English lost entirely, unlike German's three-way der/die/das.
Personal Pronouns & 'to be' / 'to have'
Personal Pronouns & 'to be' / 'to have'
Dutch pronouns split English's single 'you' into two forms, and its two most essential verbs — zijn (to be) and hebben (to have) — are irregular, just as their English counterparts are.
Sentence Structure
Sentence Structure
Dutch main clauses look deceptively like English ones at first glance, but a strict rule — the verb must sit in the second position — reshapes word order the moment anything other than the subject comes first, exactly like German.
Plural Nouns
Plural Nouns
Dutch pluralizes nouns mainly by adding -en or -s — English's own regular plural is -s, so that pattern will feel familiar, while -en will need building as a new default.
Numbers 11–100
Numbers 11–100
Dutch numbers turn transparent almost immediately — eleven and twelve are the only irregular ones, much like English's own eleven and twelve, which also don't visibly contain 'ten.'
Present Tense: Regular Verbs
Present Tense: Regular Verbs
Dutch regular verbs conjugate by trimming the infinitive down to a bare stem and adding a short, predictable set of endings — a fuller system than English's own present tense, which only marks the third person singular.
Modal Verbs
Modal Verbs
Dutch modal verbs like kunnen ('can') and moeten ('must') behave like English modals in meaning, but they push the main verb all the way to the end of the sentence — a word-order habit English speakers need to build deliberately, just as with German.
Question Words
Question Words
Dutch question words trigger the same verb-second inversion as any fronted word, while English instead relies on a helper verb ('do') to form most of its questions.
Negation
Negation
Dutch splits negation between two words, niet and geen, chosen by what you're negating — a two-way fork English's single 'not' doesn't have.
Adjective Agreement
Adjective Agreement
Dutch adjectives add a single -e ending in most positions, but stay bare in one specific spot — a habit English doesn't have at all, since English adjectives never change form.
Possessive Adjectives
Possessive Adjectives
Dutch possessives — mijn, jouw, zijn, and the rest — never change for the gender or number of the noun they describe, matching English's own invariant possessives (my, your, his) closely.
Daily Routine & Separable Verbs
Daily Routine & Separable Verbs
Dutch, like German, builds many verbs by gluing a prefix onto a base verb — and in the present tense, that prefix breaks off and jumps to the end of the sentence, a behavior with no true English equivalent, though English's own phrasal verbs share a family resemblance.