Dutch Lessons

Lessons

Beginner

· 16 lessons

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.

Lesson 2A1

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.

Lesson 3A1

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.

Lesson 4A1

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.

Lesson 5A1

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.

Lesson 6A1

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.

Lesson 7A1

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.

Lesson 8A1

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.

Lesson 9A1

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.'

Lesson 10A1

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.

Lesson 11A1

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.

Lesson 12A1

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.

Lesson 13A1

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.

Lesson 14A1

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.

Lesson 15A1

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.

Lesson 16A1

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.