This course book places a strong focus on grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills.
If you already have some basic understanding of Dutch, but your grammar skills need a bit of work then Learn Dutch! is the book for you. This course book places a strong focus on grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. While working with this book, students will also work extensively on pronunciation exercises to help them speak and understand the different sounds and tones of the Dutch language.
Learn Dutch! is divided into 26 lessons. The first lesson starts off with an in-depth pronunciation exercise. The first part of this section encourages the student to repeat a number of words or phrases to practice sounding out specific sounds. If you already have some knowledge of Dutch, you will realize most of the words in some phrases don’t exist; these made up words are simply written down to help students with pronunciation practice. For extra help there is also phonetic appendix provided at the end of the book, but if you are not familiar with the phonetic alphabet this section may not be very beneficial.
"If you already know some Dutch and would like to brush up on your skills, then this book could be exactly what you’re looking for."
After the pronunciation activities, the lessons that follow all focus on grammar rules and exercises. New vocabulary is also introduced and a number of example sentences, dialogues and reading activities are also provided. The examples in each chapter always have English translations, but unfortunately the reading comprehension activities are completely written in Dutch. In order to help students understand the text a bit more, each reading activity comes with a vocabulary list. Although this helps students understand the text a bit more, an absolute beginner student might struggle to completely understand the entire reading activity without any English translations. Once the reading activity has been worked on, the chapter wraps up with some comprehension questions.
The chapters are also not all a specific length, but as the student advances each chapter will become somewhat longer. In Learn Dutch!, students will also come across some amusing pictures and illustrations in each chapter. At the end of the book students will also find an English-Dutch and Dutch-English glossary which lists all of the vocabulary provided from all the previous chapters. One of the negative points about Learn Dutch! is that it doesn’t come with any speaking activities or CD’s to help students put all four language skills to use.
If you or your students need to focus on listening comprehension or speaking, this book might not be very useful. If you are going on holiday to a Dutch speaking country I also would not recommend this book. The book also doesn’t teach any important phrases, vocabulary related to travelling/tourism, or even examples of casual conversations. If you already know some Dutch and would like to brush up on your skills, then this book could be exactly what you’re looking for. Each lesson will give you a variety of rules, examples, reading texts, translations, and pronunciation activities. This book can be used as complementary material or it can even be used in group classes for homework activities.
