English/ Dutch

[Heathercob]

AIBU to think that if I bought both the English and Dutch version of the same book, and read them simultaneously, that I would be able to learn some Dutch?

I'm going to say no, and I am a linguist and studied Dutch as a module of German at university. A PP recommended watching Dutch tv with subtitles and I would echo this and duolingo. English and Dutch are both Germanic languages and you will notice many similarities with each other. Good luck and enjoy!

I improved my Dutch by reading some children's books, the best one I had was 101 1 minute long children's stories. At first it took more than 5 minutes and quite a lot of translation but by half way through the book it was closer to a minute.

No. This would be a slow, frustrating and ineffective way to learn a language. I've been a languages teacher for 25 years and am learning a new language myself atm.

At a time when there are so many amazing resources available for language learning, I can't imagine why anyone would try and do it the way you're proposing. At best you will be able to go "Ah - that word in Dutch must mean that word there in English". That's not really learning a language!

I have a head-start because I'm a linguist already and the language I'm learning has similarities to one I already speak. But I mostly do tons of listening - YouTube videos, podcasts, audiobooks etc.

I've decided that it would be easier to learn on Duolingo 😊. My Grandma's German, and I can speak and understand that, so am I right in thinking that Dutch is similar!

Well it's a bit similar, yes. If you already speak German, that will certainly be helpful in comprehension terms.

Dutch and German are quite similar. Particularly in how past tenses are formed and the word order rules, as well as many of the actual words. Dutch has easier grammar as you don't have to worry about the dative, accusative, genitive etc cases giving different words for 'the' and so forth, but German pronunciation seems much easier to me. And with a similar level of each language i think spoken German is much easier to understand than spoken Dutch.

After studying dutch at night school (pre internet and just for the hell of it), i improved it by reading easy novels. But without the initial grounding that would have been pointless.

If you can speak German then Dutch will be fine. I first learnt both 30 years ago & have recently been downloading Dutch & German books to my kindle to try & keep it fresh in my memory. I'm conscious that we usually visit Holland annually but with Covid we haven't been for 18 months & I don't want to lose it!