r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 4d ago

Unsing "old english" to try to speak with people from Friesland (Netherlands). Video

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u/Tinne_Gaslobby 4d ago

Regular Dutch and Regular English are also very similar. This is why the Dutch and people from Flanders speak English so well. English is basically a grammatically very simplified version of Dutch with some words being different but a lot of them are the same/similar too.

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u/Noobnesz 4d ago

That's why even without learning Dutch, you should be able to understand some sentences in Dutch.

A famous example: "We hebben een serieus probleem."

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u/Wild_Potato_7470 4d ago

No it’s cause most things here are in English, like 80% we watch on tv, the music we hear….that’s the reason. We grow up with the English language here. What you’re saying about English, we could say the same for German and French. Dutch is all of those put into a blender

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u/realGuybrush_ 2d ago

In fact, there are a lot of similar words in English and German as well. They look different at first, but are etymologically very close and just sort of bent a little, and if you know patterns of this change, understanding and learning German becomes much easier. 't' sometimes replaced by 'z' (pronounced as 'ts'), 'i' with 'eue' (oi), 'v' with 'b', 'ee' with 'ie' (ee). For example: zu - to, feuer - fire, brennen - burn, liebe - love, etc. Also tier - deer, but "tier" means "beast" or "animal" in German, but, since deers apparently were very common on Great Britain, they were simply called beasts.