Guest article · 4 September 2026
Niederländisch enträtseln: mit System, mit Spaß, mit Liedern
I wrote a guest article for the German-language blog buurtaal about the unusual way in which I began to understand Dutch even though I had never originally planned to learn the language. The article itself is in German.
Language, music and pattern recognition
Instead of starting with grammar rules, I compared Dutch words with German ones, looked for recurring patterns and gradually built my own provisional rules. What began as guessing became a kind of linguistic puzzle.
These rules do not always work, of course. The attraction for me was precisely the process of trying them out, discarding them and refining them.
Music became the second key. Dutch songs helped turn guessed meanings into words connected with melody, mood and memory; the songs of Marco Borsato became especially important to me.