Dutch is easy, een eitje (a little egg)

Sure… many people love to believe that Dutch is hard. Quite often it seems that everything in Dutch is difficult and that it has nothing to do with English. No wonder that many people complain if they see the Dutch word eieren (eggs) for the first time. Doesn’t it look like an alien word that must be difficult to pronounce?

But…. contrary to what you may believe, eieren is much closer to English than you think…. In the 14th century eyren was a normal word. But then, all of a sudden an old Norse word came up from the North of England: eggs. Probably this was how the Vikings used to call them, but somehow the new word egg got very popular and then after the 14th century the word eyren died out, everyone started to say eggs instead of eyren and they lived happily ever after 🙂 

So here is the moral of the story: once you start to see Dutch as an outlandish form of ancient English, all of a sudden you will notice that many things make sense, even to an English mind. The only thing is that now and then you have to go back, sometimes a couple of centuries.

Dutch and English belong to the same family!

The fact is that Dutch and English are like brother and sister, they belong to the same family. Once you understand this, you will see that both languages have a lot in common with each other and then learning Dutch will become a lot easier. And who knows? One day you may call learning and speaking Dutch een eitje (a little egg) and this means that it is really easy!