Swedish does not have to be difficult: “Mark Rutte är en nederländsk politiker för det liberala Folkpartiet för Frihet och Demokrati (VVD) och Nederländernas premiärminister sedan 14 October 2010.”
If you speak one language, there are always a few other languages that are so similar that you can read some of them. For Dutch speakers, Afrikaans is the clearest example of this phenomenon: “Rutte studied the history at Leiden University.” The Frisian language is also doable: “Yn 2002 make Rutte the primal step of it bedriuwslibben nei de lânlike polityk.”
Gaston Dorren, a science journalist who previously wrote the books language tourism and Babylon wrote, plays in his latest book, Seven languages in seven days, with this phenomenon of the readability of related languages. He has chosen seven languages that Dutch tourists can encounter. Frisian. Three Scandinavian languages. And three Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese). The book is aimed at people who speak Dutch and English, and who also know something about French and German.
“The Scandinavian languages belong to the Germanic family, they resemble Dutch, English and German. That is of course very familiar. The Romance languages are less familiar to us. But thanks to our French lessons and certainly also because of the English vocabulary – because English is full of Romance words – they are still fairly accessible. Much more accessible than, for example, the Slavic languages.
“You just have to make people aware that this is the case. And that if you want to read something in such a language, you don’t necessarily have to understand everything. Feel free to skip a sentence every now and then. You have to dare to be imperfectionist. You always need a little bit of basic knowledge to get started, and I try to give that in my book.”
I think if you’ve seen such a pattern five times, it sticks better
You don’t have to learn what you immediately recognize. You get that for free. But then there are a lot of things that you just don’t recognize?
“You can learn to recognize them. My book is therefore bursting with patterns. With each pattern I give a lot of examples. Because I think if you’ve seen a pattern like that five times, it sticks better. For example, for Swedish it is good to know that the past participles in the Scandinavian languages do not begin with. If you know that, you will see more quickly that, for example, ‘drivit’ is a past participle of drift.”
You also suddenly understand that ‘sund’ is healthy, ‘still’ enough and ‘far’ danger.
„Yes, and if you know that wine is ‘vin’ you will sooner see that ‘väga’ is roads and ‘svin’ is boar. And sometimes you have to say it out loud to recognize it. What is ‘foajé’? A lobby. And there are always “false friends.” Words that look like a Dutch word, but mean something completely different. I give lists. In Swedish ‘bord’ means table, ‘opinion’ means, and ‘vacker’ is beautiful.”
What’s the hardest? Something that doesn’t resemble Dutch at all?
“Yeah, especially all those little words for he, she, it, on, under, between and because and stuff.”
The Swedish ‘när’ means when and happens to sound the same as the second syllable of when
In the Swedish sentence about Mark Rutte these are the words: ‘är’ and ‘för’ ‘det’ ‘och’ ‘sedan’.
“But some of them you recognize immediately, and there are some that you don’t recognize at all. I also give lists. The great thing is: when you start working with them, you immediately encounter them a lot. So you learn that very quickly. Sometimes I give it a mnemonic. The Swedish ‘när’ means when and happens to sound the same as the second syllable of when.
„In addition, I list the most common nouns, verbs and adjectives that you cannot recognize. For example in Swedish: ‘kvinna’, ‘kväll’ and ‘vän’. That is successively: wife, evening and friend.”
What can people achieve with this book?
“If you’re in a country where such a language is spoken, it can be very nice to get 70, 80, 90 percent of what all those shops, signs, information texts and menus are trying to say to you. You can often understand that quickly because of the context.
“And maybe you buy the local newspaper, and try to read the international news in it, because that’s pretty predictable. But it can also be nice to just read things on the internet in such a language.
“The book is based on the principle that if you start with a language, you can quickly achieve a very large effect with very little effort. When you start a language, you first make rapid progress, you learn a lot, you suddenly gain insight into such a language. On the other hand, if you want to perfect that knowledge afterwards, it will go slower and slower. I am now in my 60s and I am still learning English a little bit every day.”
Frisian has been very much influenced by Dutch over the past 500 years
It is surprising how much English can be of use to you with the Romance languages.
“English is of course a Germanic language, but very much Romanized: it is full of words that it borrowed from Latin and especially French.”
The distance between Dutch and Frisian, but also Danish, for example, has become smaller over the past thousand years. Those languages have become easier for us.
“Yes, Frisian has been very much influenced by Dutch over the past 500 years, and certainly the past 100 years. There have been three developments in the Scandinavian languages that have made them more accessible to us. They are very much influenced by Low German, the German of the north of Germany, which again resembles Dutch.
“In addition, the Scandinavian languages in turn influenced English, during the time of the Vikings, so that much English is suspiciously similar to Scandinavian and vice versa. And of course the Scandinavian languages, like many other European languages, have been influenced by Latin and Greek and have also taken in many international terms: a kind of general European vocabulary with words like organization and diagram, which we recognize effortlessly.”