Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands, also known as Holland, and is spoken by over 24 million people. It is also widely spoken in Belgium and Suriname, with smaller concentrations of speakers in France, Germany and various other former Dutch colonies. Dutch is the parent language of various Dutch creole languages and Afrikaans. It is also one of the official languages of the European Union.
People traveling to any of these Dutch speaking nations for business related purposes or on vacation will want to get a grip on the basics of the language. Also, people who already speak a Dutch creole based language will find it easy to learn Dutch as a second or third language. There are lots of institutes that offer to teach Dutch as a foreign language. Classroom based learning is the accepted and traditional way of learning a language. It is recommended for those that can spare the required time to regularly attend classes; it helps them learn the language with the help of an able human tutor, with plenty of one on one attention, and gives the opportunity to interact with fellow learners of the language and speed up learning in the process.
But, for those that do not have the luxury of time to go to regular classes to learn Dutch, there are plenty of other options available. Books and CDs that aid a learner in teaching themselves a language have always been popular. CDs improve over conventional books as they are rich in multimedia content such as audio and video guides and language ability building games. At multilingualbooks.com is a great online resource for people searching for Dutch learning material. It is an online store for various books and software for Dutch learners. Featured on the site is the Tell Me More For Dutch software, one of the most popular software programs available for learning the Dutch language. It is a comprehensive Dutch language learning package, which covers beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. It is an activity rich course with 35 kinds of activities and a total of 2600 language learning exercises across the three levels. It has ample video and audio guides, and incorporates state of the art speech recognition technology to recognize what the learner is saying, and assess it and correct mistakes, if any.
101languages.com sells Linguaphone Dutch Complete Course, which is, as the name implies, a complete course for the Dutch language learner – covering all four aspects of the language: namely, spoken, written, comprehension and reading skills. It has an 8 CD set of audio recordings of conversations involving native speakers of the language and a handbook and exercise book that supplement the CDs. The handbooks contain printed transcripts of the audio conversations, so that the learner can follow them as they listen to the conversations on the CDs. 101languages.com also sells a number of other learning Dutch media.
Other options to consider are the online Dutch learning courses offered by various websites. learndutch.org and speakdutch are sites that offer online Dutch learning courses.
