Emotions & Feelings
Emotions & Feelings
Some Dutch emotion verbs turn the sentence inside out: bevallen puts the thing being liked in the subject slot and the person in the object slot, so 'I like it here' becomes Het bevalt me hier — literally 'it pleases me here'.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
bevallen and opvallen: the thing is the subject
Het bevalt me hier. Het valt me op dat hij stil is.
I like it here. I notice that he's quiet.
With these verbs the experiencer is not the subject. bevallen ('to please') makes the situation the subject and the person an object: Bevalt je nieuwe baan? means 'do you like your new job?'. opvallen works the same way for noticing. English almost always puts the person first, so these sentences have to be rebuilt rather than translated.
Emotions take fixed prepositions
boos op iemand, blij met iets, bang voor iets, jaloers op iemand
angry at someone, happy with something, afraid of something, jealous of someone
Each emotion adjective governs its own preposition and they do not match the English ones: boos op, blij met, bang voor, trots op, jaloers op, geïrriteerd door. When the object is a clause rather than a noun, the preposition disappears and dat takes over: Ik ben blij dat je er bent.
Reflexive verbs for emotional states
Ik erger me aan het lawaai. Hij schaamt zich.
The noise annoys me. He's ashamed.
A whole family of emotion verbs is reflexive: zich ergeren aan ('to be annoyed by'), zich schamen ('to be ashamed'), zich zorgen maken over ('to worry about'), zich verheugen op ('to look forward to'). English expresses most of these with an adjective or a passive, so the Dutch pattern — a reflexive pronoun plus a fixed preposition — has to be learned as a package.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
- English
- happy
- English
- angry
- English
- sad
- English
- afraid
- English
- relieved
- English
- jealous
- English
- to please / to be to one's liking
- English
- to be annoyed by
- English
- to look forward to
- English
- to worry
Finished this lesson?