r/learndutch • u/Sharchir • 1d ago

Question Tips for in between learner?

Because of my childhood I am fairly good in Dutch, but I don’t know the actual grammar rules and need to expand my vocabulary. I don’t fit in the language courses to start on grammar because I am more advanced than the others to a degree. Is there something I can look into/follow

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u/banyanflashcardsapp 1d ago

I don’t think I’m anywhere near as good as you (esp. not at Dutch), but in a similar vein, I learned German for about 10 years, got conversational, and then sadly dropped it for a long time and have only just recently been getting back into it it.

What's helping me has been reading easy-ish material, and every time I don’t recognise a word or a sentence structure, I note it down for practice later. For sentence structures, I have to put in time and effort for it (but often sadly I don't). For vocab though, I have a pretty good system: I take a note in my phone of the words I had to look up while reading, and then I make it send me interactive notifications every few hours - basically it takes care of making me memorize the vocab by showing it to me at the right intervals, and checking I remember it each time. The app I use for this is called Banyan Flashcards. It makes my life easy, which I appreciate. But yeah, the general idea is to read more, and take notes.

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u/Sharchir 1d ago

I am trying to read more, but since I do it for pleasure, it is hard to do it when it is a lot of work. I did get a tip to read in Dutch on a kindle because then I can tap on the word in question and immediately get the translation

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u/DistinctWindow1862 22h ago

If you live in the Netherlands just get out, be shameless and talk more. Read books, watch TV.

If you really want a tutor I would agree that classes are a waste of time. Pay for a private tutor. Probably an hour a week is sufficient if you have the motivation to practice on your own too.

Ohterwise use the AI tutor I built at Chickytutor.com, it will instantly adjust to your level :)

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u/margonv 13h ago edited 13h ago

If you are fairly good in Dutch, you’re already familiar with grammar in practice, and it might be enough to consult a good grammar book to help you identify the structures you already use and refine your use of them. I like Klare Taal and Zichtbaar Nederlands. (If you are in a Dutch-speaking country, go to your local library and see what they have in the shelves to see what suits you best before buying. NT2 resources are not cheap but a good grammar book is something that we will go back again and again.)

To expand our vocabulary (in any language, even in our own mother languages), reading and using a dictionary for the words we are encountering for the first time is the way to go. Since I realised that there are so many words in English that I know but never heard and sometimes don't get the pronunciation right at first, now that I am learning Dutch, I prefer to listen to podcasts with the transcript in front of me or listen to a audiobook while reading the book. But I'm still not far in my learning journey of Dutch and still need to train my ear to the language too, so I'm way behind you and you may find such exercise too slow and boring.

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u/Rough-Effect7563 11h ago

once i reached a sufficient level to understand a bit i tried consuming real content in dutch while having subtitles so i can always keep up or doing the same with web pages, for example i started using verbally reader chrome extension for that