Is Dutch Hard To Learn? (Answered!)

As an English speaker, Dutch is one of the more straightforward languages to learn. Learning any language is never easy and doing so will take time, but you have a considerable leg up when it comes to learning Dutch. Nonetheless, you should prepare yourself for some difficult elements to the language.

Learning languages is a wide spectrum of difficulty.

You naturally have some languages that are incredibly difficult for any English speaker to learn by any metrics.

Compared with these languages, Dutch may be said to be “easy”.

But you are still learning an entirely new language, and that takes time and patience.

Let’s find out more.

How hard is it to learn Dutch?

Relatively speaking, Dutch is not going to be all that hard for you to learn.

It is very closely related to English and thus the two languages share many similarities which will act as foundational blocks for your learning.

In a way, you won’t be exactly starting from the ground up when you learn Dutch as an English speaker.

You’ll have a basic understanding of many elements of the language including grammar and vocabulary, though the stress here is on the “basic” understanding.

There are still many differences that you’ll have to get to grips with, and again, learning a language is never easy, it’s just that learning one language may be easier than learning another one.

Understanding language families can be a helpful perspective in understanding why a given language might be more or less difficult.

This is only a rule of thumb and just because a language is closely related to your own doesn’t necessarily mean a language is easier, but it often does.

English and Dutch are both Germanic languages, and are thus about as closely related as two languages can be.

English gives you a great foundation for being able to learn Dutch more easily, although again, it’s still not going to be a breeze.

There are still things that make aspects of Dutch very difficult.

Pronunciations are very often a point of difficulty, as the consonant sounds can be unfamiliar to English speakers.

The word order can also be very confusing to non-Dutch speakers, and there are many exceptions to most given rules.

While any language is going to present such troubles, the point is to remember that we can only really say a language is “easy” to learn in relative terms.

Dutch might be easier to learn than Mandarin, but that doesn’t make it easy.

How long does it take to learn Dutch?

The FSI for language learning categorizes languages based on their relative difficulty, and thus the time it will take to learn them, for an English speaker.

There are five categories within this scale, with languages in category one being the easiest to learn. Dutch, unsurprisingly, is a category one language, and estimates suggest that this will take most people around 600-750 hours of study to learn.

This is to reach a certain level of proficiency at which you’re able to conduct yourself in Dutch and you could handle yourself well in the language.

However, learning any language doesn’t stop there.

Once you’ve completed this amount of study, continuing to go to classes is still advised.

Beyond that, though, virtually any language teacher will tell you the best way to really cement your language skills and take it to the next level is to live in the country and speak the language every day.

With Dutch, within only a couple of short years of constantly using the language you will probably be approaching full fluency.

Within five years, you may even be at native level. In either case, both the study and the period following it are vital.

Is Dutch harder than French?

Dutch is generally considered to be a lot easier than French.

An important reason for this, as we touched on earlier, is the language families to which these two languages belong.

Dutch, like English, is a Germanic language and ultimately very closely related to English. French, on the other hand, is a Romance language, in the same category as languages such as Italian and Spanish.

Of course, it all depends on your own native language.

For English speakers, though, Dutch will undoubtedly be the easier language to learn.

Is Dutch harder than German?

Dutch is considerably easier to learn than German, which is a notoriously difficult language.

This is an important exception to the rule of thumb about language families, which will help you understand its limited value.

German, unsurprisingly, is a Germanic language, and more closely related to English than is French or Spanish.

However, both of those Romance languages are much easier to learn than German.

So, despite being more closely related, German is harder to learn.

It has complex cases and the syntax can be highly difficult for English speakers to get to grips with.

Dutch, then, despite its equally close relationship to German, is the much easier language to learn.

So, if there were any such thing as an “easy” language to learn for an English speaker, Dutch would certainly be a candidate.

That said, it is far from easy. Learning a language is tough and will take time, so you’ve got to prepare yourself for the long haul—you aren’t going to breeze through it.

At the same time, it’s certainly going to take a lot less time than it would to learn German or French!

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