Would you know what to do if you like to learn Dutch a lot faster? Study harder? Many people believe that if you study harder, you'll learn faster, but... - maybe you already discovered it for yourself - this is not true...
On the contrary... chances are high that if you try to memorize everything by hard and if you just study and study like crazy that somehow your Dutch will not go forward. The reason is very simple.. If you like to move forward fast, then there is one thing that you need to do: make sure that you understand how Dutch really works. Once you discover this, then everything will be a lot easier :)
Let's start with a simple example. Do you know what the Dutch word rond means? Hopefully you will not find it very difficult to guess that rond means round right? Here is a great example sentence: de bal is rond. You do not need a translation, right?
But.... now it is time for the next step... Would it make sense if you see or hear this? Het contract is rond. Sure... many things can be rond in Dutch.... de maan (moon), de aarde (earth), de zon (sun), but het contract?
If this sentences surprises you, then you are not the only one. And yet... the solution is very simple. In Dutch, many words - certainly the easy ones - can have multiple meanings. Yes... rond could be round and it also means that something is ready, has been finished and is complete. If you say: de cirkel is rond, it means the circle is round and... somehow it also means that things are complete now.
Therefore if you say het contract is rond, it means that everything has been signed now and taken care of. If you like you could also say: het project is rond. Or if you like, you could say: het project is financieel rond., then it means that there are no money problems for the project and that at least money is no obstacle anymore.
By the way, would you be able to decode this sentence? Ik kom niet rond. Also here it means that somehow you cannot complete things. If you translate it literally into I come not round, then of course it would not make any sense. But.... ik kom niet rond, simply means that you do not have enough money, that you cannot make it.
Can you see that somehow Dutch has a logical way of thinking? And that sometimes it can be different from English? So, here is an important thing that you need to do.... All you need to do is to discover how the Dutch language really works. And no.... it is not something that you need to memorize or to study. All you have to do is to play a lot with the language, so that all these things come to the surface in a relaxed and natural way.
Once again, most people mainly repeat the same boring sentences over and over again and only memorize. But... although you would learn something, with a rigid mind, learning is always low and probably you will not speak loads of Dutch any time soon...
With an open mind however, everything changes. Once you have started how to be more flexible, creative and playful, you'll notice that all of a sudden many more things start to make perfect sense. And then, when many more things make perfect sense to you, it is easy to use many words in many different contexts. In other words, all of a sudden you'll enjoy much more freedom!
The only thing is that opening your mind can feel like a lot of effort and you may believe that if you just follow the text of your book, it will be easier. Maybe you don't like to think for yourself and you like the idea that each word that you learn by heart can only have one meaning.
But...why not come to the conclusion that the opposite is true!? Why not play with language and really have fun with it? It would be a faster way of learning :)
If you like the idea of rapidly expanding your Dutch, while playing then the 7 day course Dutch Brainwash could be something for you. How you can transform your Dutch in 7 days
