ext_282052 ([identity profile] mistress-elaine.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] muckefuck 2005-08-02 02:48 pm (UTC)

Gewichtig, eh? Heh. That made me smile. Sorry. :-)

I'll have to think about other false friends. The only one I can come up with off the top of my head is not to use gezusters where you'd use Geschwister in German. Dutch gezusters only means "sisters" (and is fairly old-fashioned at that), not siblings in general. "Siblings" would be broers of zussen.

One major grammatical difference between Dutch and German (other than the lack of noun cases and all that) is the lack of worden at the end of passive sentences. In German you'll find sentences such as, ich bin entdeckt worden. In Dutch, you leave out the worden: ik ben ontdekt. That holds true for all passive sentences.

Then, of course, there are the pronunciation false friends: sp, st, sch and eu. Once you get the hang of those, though, Dutch pronunciation really isn't too tricky.

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