Afrikaans or dutch

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Gbelle
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Afrikaans or dutch

Postby Gbelle » 2011-08-18, 17:09

I'm uncertain which to learn. I think Afrikaans is a lot more useful in Australia.
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linguoboy
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Re: Afrikaans or dutch

Postby linguoboy » 2011-08-18, 17:31

Gbelle wrote:I'm uncertain which to learn. I think Afrikaans is a lot more useful in Australia.

Is "usefulness" your primary criterion when choosing a language to learn? How to you go about determining it?

FWIW, Ethnologue lists more than twice as many speakers of Dutch in Australia as Afrikaans-speakers (i.e. 36,183 vs 16,806). Both numbers are tiny compared to the totals for such languages as Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic, Mandarin, and Vietnamese (each with over 190,000 speakers). Moreover, I think if you looked at figures for speakers who were monolingual in these languages, the totals for both Dutch and Afrikaans would be nugatory.
Last edited by linguoboy on 2011-08-18, 17:42, edited 1 time in total.
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Gbelle
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Re: Afrikaans or dutch

Postby Gbelle » 2011-08-18, 17:34

Well this time i want an easy language, where the orthography is consistent to it's phonology. Where the grammar is not too difficult, and it's germanic, and nearby where my genetics of origin is, Afrikaans is a sub group of dutch so it can be forgiven.
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Shiba
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Re: Afrikaans or dutch

Postby Shiba » 2011-08-28, 18:33

The easiness of a language you learn really depends which language you're starting from. Unfortunately, I don't know Dutch. However, starting from English, I'd say Afrikaans is a generally easy language. No case-determined suffixes, and only one word for "the".

I'd also say, look at how much Swedish helps you (your profile tells me that you know a bit about it; and even if it's not much, it's certainly better than nothing). I don't know much about the Dutch/Swedish relationship either. However, I do know that the Afrikaans/Norwegian relationship is pretty good, and a lot of words are spelled exactly the same in Afrikaans and Norwegian.

Another thing to consider is how Afrikaans or Dutch may help you in learning other languages later on. Afrikaans is, weirdly enough, quite useful for Slavic languages. Completely different, but a lot of the sounds are similar.
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Re: Afrikaans or dutch

Postby Ikbent » 2012-02-14, 21:16

I am Dutch myself and I can tell you that Afrikaans is probably easier to learn. At least from my point of view, it looks like it has an easier, more regular grammar.

I have never studied it thoroughly though.

When you can understand Dutch, you can understand quite some Afrikaans. I am not sure whether the same holds the other way around though...

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Re: Afrikaans or dutch

Postby Shiba » 2012-02-23, 15:49

It does. :)

I think Afrikaans grammar is probably a lot easier. We've got some weird spelling rules, but I didn't notice them until I had to learn them in the 10th grade, and obviously the spelling doesn't much influence the difficulty of actually speaking it.
Native: Afrikaans (af) English (en) || Intermediate: German (de) || Beginner: Some odd combination of Riksmål and Bokmål and whatever (no) || Learning on-and-off: Russian (ru) || Curious: Breton (br) Welsh (cy) Finnish (fi)
Korrigere feilene mine, vær så snill!

Die HERE is my herder; niks sal my ontbreek nie. ~ Psalm 23:1


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