Anyway, Tegelwippen is where you "flip tiles" and replace them with plants. The basic play is that it reduces flooding, and regulates temperature. Plus its pretty.
https://interlace-hub.com/national-dutch-championship-%E2%80...
The thing that makes its dutch, is that they don't tend to use asphalt in holland for paving, its mostly tiles. This means that you don't need anything other than hand tooling to make a change.
I don't want to be too pedantic, but it's not. Dutch syntax is very similar to German, both are typically analyzed as an SOV (subject-object-verb) language with movement of the finite verb to the V2 position in declarative main clauses, unlike English.
Word order of Dutch and German clauses (+ some other Germanic languages) are typically described in terms of topological fields [1] and Dutch and German have very similar (albeit not the same) topological field constraints, leading to very similar word orders. Like German, Dutch has grammatical genders (three like German, though only two are distinguished in definite articles), similar verb conjugation, etc.
People are often led to believe that Dutch is more similar to English because it doesn't have overt case marking.
[1] Simplified, a clause is partitioned into a vorfeld, mittelfeld, and nachfeld by the so-called brackets, which are the V2 and verb cluster positions.
There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more. Mostly things are a lot simpler these days than they used to be. Older Dutch texts are hard to read even for Dutch people. Even texts from the 19th century look very different from modern Dutch.
Finally, the reason English speakers recognize a lot of Dutch words is because a lot of English words actually have Dutch origins. For example, the word cookie is a bastardized form of the Dutch koekje. Especially a lot of naval jargon comes straight from Dutch. The reason for this is long trade relations, colonizing the same places (e.g. New York used to be New Amsterdam), etc. There even was a Dutch king on the British throne in the seventeenth century.
Maybe I should just learn Dutch and dump English?
But Dutch is very similar to German, indeed, and both are also similar to Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
Do you have recommended references about these grammatical constructs ?
My experience was it isn't particularly easier or harder than any other language to learn.
The grammar and word ordering is different enough that you really have to study and practice a lot how to structure sentences. Pronunciation of some sounds (like 'ui') can be pretty hard if you've never had to make those sounds before in your life.
But indeed the spelling is much more consistent than English, which definitely helps a ton with reading and writing.
I moved to the NL 14 years ago, took the Staatsexamen for naturalisation after Brexit, have had a couple of jobs where Dutch was the first language, but my Dutch still isn't perfect and I regularly make mistakes.
That being said, I am now finally at the stage where I can go on a day trip to Amsterdam and the locals don't speak English back to me when I speak Dutch. :)
Was in Amsterdam again yesterday for the first time in a couple years and was again surprised to notice how many people just default to English, or waiters who speak back to me in English after me ordering in (my native) Dutch. Finding people to speak Dutch back to you in Amsterdam is an impressive feat in itself! :D Either way, congrats on becoming accentless enough that people don't hear it anymore and jump on the opportunity to speak English!
That's seriously impressive. Dutch is my mother tongue and they still respond to me in English! (Although I speak a slightly different dialect, Flemish, from Belgium.)
Then I suspect you've never tried to learn languages that are very different from English like Mandarin, Hungarian, or Tamil.
The average Dutch person has a passive vocabulary of about 42k words, the average German speaker has only 20k passive vocabulary.
In German 1300 words make up about 85 % of a text, in Dutch you need 2000.
https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Zum-Umfang-...
Didn't find a source for dutch people.
Are you sure that there study/studies are sound and use directly comparable measures for passive vocabulary items?
Still, pretty cool stuff.
[1] https://hilversum.nl/en/mijn-wijk/geveltuintje-aanleggen
> Bij het NK Tegelwippen hebben we nogal wat affiniteit met de bloemetjes en de bijtjes (snap je ‘m?)
which loosely translates to “We at NK Tegelwippen are rather fond of the birds and the bees (get it?)”
For context, “wippen” means “to flip <something> over” and “to hop on a seesaw” but it’s also polite slang for having sex.
At least, I have a very hard time associating ‘tegel’ and the sexual version of ‘wippen’.
If you want to go even easier, Afrikaans is like Dutch but with even more English influences and even fewer grammar rules afaik, e.g. no verb conjugations: where in Dutch you say "ik ga, hij gaat, wij gaan" (I go, he goes, we go), in Afrikaans that's something like "ek gaan, hy gaan, wy gaan".
I don't think knowing Afrikaans reasonably would allow you to also reasonably read Dutch though, if that were the goal (let alone German, which is practically unintelligible to someone who speaks perfect Dutch and English if they didn't also have any amount of German training)
Having your house looking cozy even on the facade is the most dutch thing I've read in a while.
Driving a bicycle to your place is always practical, also considering most of the city is within 3km of the town hall (~10 minutes cycling) and the worst terrain you'll encounter is needing to get over/under a canal
As an American who lived in Amsterdam for 3 years, to learn from their horticultural and eco leadership, I can say this is perfectly typical of the Dutch. Smart, easy, sustainable, beautiful.
