Describing People
Describing People
To say how somebody looks, Dutch uses a construction with no English parallel at all: eruitzien, a verb that wraps er, uit and zien around whatever you want to say. 'He looks tired' becomes Hij ziet er moe uit.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
eruitzien: the verb for appearance, split across the clause
Hij ziet er moe uit. Je ziet er goed uit.
He looks tired. You look good.
English 'look' simply takes an adjective: 'he looks tired'. Dutch uses the separable verb eruitzien, which in a main clause breaks into three pieces: the conjugated ziet in second position, er just after the subject, and uit at the very end, with the adjective squeezed in before it. The pattern is completely fixed, so it is best memorized as a frame — ... ziet er ... uit — into which you drop any adjective.
lijken op for resemblance, lijken for seeming
Hij lijkt op zijn vader. Het lijkt moeilijk.
He looks like his father. It seems difficult.
With the preposition op, lijken means 'to resemble': Ze lijkt op haar moeder. Without it, the same verb means 'to seem': Dat lijkt logisch. English uses two different expressions — 'look like' and 'seem' — so the shared Dutch verb can be confusing until you notice that the presence of op is what switches the meaning.
Hair and eyes take a plural noun and an inflected adjective
Zij heeft lange, blonde haren en blauwe ogen.
She has long blonde hair and blue eyes.
English treats 'hair' as an uncountable singular. Dutch commonly uses the plural haren when describing someone's hair, which means the adjectives take their plural -e ending too: lange, blonde haren. The singular het haar is used for hair as a substance or a single strand. Note also that Dutch separates stacked adjectives with a comma, just as English does.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
- English
- kind / nice
- English
- friendly
- English
- shy
- English
- clever
- English
- lazy
- English
- honest
- English
- to look / appear
- English
- to resemble
- English
- the hair
- English
- the eyes
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