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[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

How different is dutch to German? Are they mutually intelligible?

[–]YORAMRWWhite nationalist, eugenicist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's complicated, they're sort of mutually intelligble but also not really. For me personally, written German is a lot more intelligble than spoken German, since German is very similar to Dutch regarding grammar and vocabulary, whereas pronounciation is very different.

What makes German especially difficult for someone like me, who's only fluent in Dutch and English, is the huge amount of declensions in German, and the fact that German has a lot of false friends (words that exist and are gramarically correct in both Dutch and German but mean something different in either language).

German, Dutch and English are all West-Germanic languages, but I'd say generally speaking Dutch has more in common with English than with German. If you're fluent in Dutch, have a very basic grasp of German, and can imitate a German accent, like I do, you can probably have a basic conversation in German with Germans using "fake German" (German accent but with Dutch grammar and only Dutch words), but when I'm in Germany I just end up speaking English with them since that's easier for both of us.