Colloquial Dutch: A Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (Cassette))

Rating:
Summary: Great Jumpstarter to Dutch...
Review: I emigrated to the Netherlands two years ago from California, an English-monolingual culture. I was familiar with Afrikaans, since I was born in South Africa. This made learning Dutch a lot easier for me, so I very quickly came up to speed. However, it was the book by Donaldson which was the vehicle that brought me up to speed. I know this because after I rapidly moved forward as I used the book, I recommended it to an American who also found the book useful. I had a number of other texts, but I quickly abandoned them and concentrated on Donaldson's book.

After settling down to life in Amsterdam, the things that REALLY helped were the "colloquialisms" mentioned by Donaldson, and the little "culture points". They were enormously helpful. Dutch has a lot of idiom, and you need to understand what is happening in the syntax and delivery and the culture points also help clarify why things are being said the way they are when they are by whom under what circumstances. But any language is that way, including English !

Of course you need a dictionary ! You cannot rely on the word list in the book. Of course you need a verb conjugator (like 201 Dutch Verbs). And I would add, that after you get serious, you will also need a specialist idiomatic reference and dictionary.

The book was not all I needed to learn Dutch. I had to go to courses to get better, and you must also force yourself to use the language and to hurl yourself deep into a Dutch-only environment. English is pervasive and you can end up in an English universe in the Netherlands. A Dutch live-in partner would also help. Watching TV (cartoons are a great help), subtitling, listening to the radio (online too), reading the newspaper and magazines and web pages all add as an addendum to the book and daily usage.

This is a very good, serious first-level starer, folks ! The tapes too !

Rating:
Summary: Essential in Amsterdam
Review: I'm in the Amsterdam airport right now. The announcements over the loudspeaker for gate changes and such are all in Dutch...which is very scary because I don't speak it. If you plan to spend some time in the Amsterdam airport you should get this book first. Granted, they make the announcements in English eventually but the first burst of Dutch sure can scare a guy. Save yourself the pain and grab this book first. Oh...they are talking in Thai now...better buy that one too.

Rating:
Summary: Een goed boek.
Review: This was the closest thing I could find to a college textbook for first-year Dutch. Each chapter has about 4 grammar lessons, about 6 blocks of exercises to drill you on the grammar lessons, about 4 dialogues to read and hear on tapes which illustrate the grammar lessons, plus a couple of blocks on Dutch/Flemish culture.

The whole thing is very well done. If you're willing to devote the kind of effort you would in a one-year college course, you should be quite satisfied. Bruce Donaldson is a good writer/teacher. The back of the book contains answers to all the exercises, very helpful for self-study. In the dialogues you encounter many common family and tourist situations. By the end of the book, you'll have encountered all verb tenses and many common grammatical constructions. In fact, you'll have a working knowledge of basic Dutch.

There are a couple of things about the book I would like to see changed. At a few places, you're taught the correct way to say something, followed by a statement to the effect that in practice it's often said in some technically incorrect way that you are then taught at length. In effect, you're being taught slang. I personally don't like this in a text for beginners. I suspect that the author was influenced by the "colloquial" in the title.

Another point is that the book doesn't have many vocabulary lists. You usually first encounter words in the dialogues or exercises. You can usually, but not always, find the word defined in the glossary at the back of the book. Get a Dutch-English dictionary to supplement the book.

Sometimes grammatical constructions appear in dialogues long before they're formally explained in the text. You end up initially learning these things by rote without understanding them well. I assume this was intentional on the part of the author (we learned our native language this way). You just find yourself thumbing back to past dialogues at times. Since the dialogues are an essential part of the learning experience, I strongly recommend you shell out the extra money for the tapes. Dutch pronunciation is quite challenging, all the more reason to get the tapes.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed working my way through this book and I'm satisfied with the amount of Dutch I was able to learn. I don't think anything else in print would have served me as well.