Can You Correct These Basic Dutch Sentences

Are there any rules to sentence construction in Dutch?

Yes of course. There a quite a few and they are pretty different from, say English or French.First of all Dutch is not a regular SVO (subject-verb-object) language. This becomes particularly clear in dependent clauses:In English:He said that he had seen the man yesterdayDutch:Hij zei dat hij de man gisteren gezien hadThe order is actually SOV (rather than SVO!) with the adverb in between: SOadvVIn main clauses the verbal cluster splits up. The finite part goes like SVO, the participle in last position:Hij had de man gisteren gezienSo you get [math]SV_1OadvV_2[/math]If you only have a finite verb like:He saw the manHij zag de manit looks like English and Dutch have the same SVO word order, but the above will make clear that that is rather deceptive and fortuitous in its simplicity. The underlying rules are rather different.There are many more rules related to the position of direct and indirect objects and adverbs, but let me add one more that is particularly perplexing to French and only little less so to English speakers: separable verbsIn English some verbs gain a new meaning when the are combined with a prepositional adverb. (I’m using Dutch terminology here: we call them adverbs and there are reason for that)E.g.to go → to go offthe gun went offSimilarly in Dutchhet geweer ging afHowever, look at the Dutch infinitives. There is actually two, the plain one and the one that is extended with the preposition to (“te” in Dutch)afgaan - af te gaanAs you see the two parts can unite and can separate. This affects the word order in main and in indirect clauses:Het geweer ging plotseling af — suddenly the gun went offIk zeg dat het geweer plotseling afging. — I say that the gun went off suddenly.So because the finite part “ging” moves to the end it unites with the adverb “af”. Notice also that the adverb “plotseling” is between the two separate parts in the main clause, just like the [math]SV_1OadvV_2 [/math]order we saw above.

Are these Dutch sentences correct? "God woont in Jeruzalem. Hij bezoekt elke andere plaats (Hij bezoekt overal anders). intended to mean: “God lives in Jerusalem. He visits everywhere else or every other place.”

Thanks for the A2A.Let's be a bit blunt, to conform to one Dutch stereotype. The first sentence is grammatically correct. No corrections there. The second one is a bit odd and I believe it is not a correct sentence, as the meaning of that Dutch sentence is not entirely clear. When you want to say “he visits everywhere else” (which, in my humble opinion, is a bit of a weird sentence in English as well), it would be a bit better to say “alle andere plekken bezoekt Hij” (notice the capital, which is used when you talk about God) which literally translates to “all other places visits He”. If you want to stress that the just visits other places (“he only visits all other places”), you add the word “slechts” at the end of the previous Dutch sentence.The meaning of the word “anders” is usually closest to the English word “different” or “not the same” (although we would translate the latter to “niet dezelfde/hetzelfde”). Using it the way you did to refer to all other places is a bit weird to a native speaker, and they probably wouldn't understand exactly what you meant, unless they translated the sentence word by word in English and chose the correct translation. Google translate or other non-human translators are great ways to translate words from Dutch to English and vice versa, not so much to translate full sentences, because of the other of the woods and the subtleties in the meaning of those words.Sometimes you can use the word “overal” when you mean “everywhere”. You would use it in sentences like “God is everywhere” (God is overal). In that case, the location is a bit less specified than in your sentences, where you refer to Jerusalem. When there is such a specification, you are usually a bit more specific in your use of other places in the rest of the story as well when speaking Dutch.Hope this helped!N.B. I feel obliged to say that my comments are only referring to the Dutch language used in these sentences and not the contents itself, i.e. I have not discussed and I am not going to discuss the accuracy of the sentences themselves.

Are there any Dutch sentences that can be understood by English speakers?

Yes.Dutch has a lot of similarities with English. Although heavily influenced by Latin, French and Greek; English still happens to be a Germanic language much like Dutch and German. Everyday words in English are still pretty Germanic in origin.Here are some common Dutch sentences that an English speaker would understand almost entirely:Hij is een goede man. (He is a good man)Appel is een fruit. (Apple is a fruit)Ik drink twee glazen bier. (I drink two glasses of beer)Het is niet warm in de winter. (It is not hot in winter)Pardon, dit is mijn station. (Excuse me, this is my station)Dit is een oud huis. (This is an old house)Mijn vader is dokter. (My father is a doctor).Het water op de tafel is koud. (The water on the table is cold)Wij hebben tomaten, brood, suiker en koffie. (We have tomatoes, bread, sugar and coffee)Hallo, waar is de supermarkt? (Hello, where is the supermarket?)You see? An English speaker can understand simple Dutch sentences without much hassle.Of course there are only a handful of sentences that are this easy. Others will involve unknown words and complex constructions. But hey some similarities are better than no similarities any day, right?Cheers!Edit: added better sentences after it was pointed out that a couple of my examples were not entirely correct.

What is the fastest way to learn Dutch?

The fastest way to learn Dutch is to do the “Delftse methode” intensive language course, which is given at the Delft University of Technology. (No, you don’t need to be a student there). The introductory course (“The Green Book”/”Het Groene Boek”) is 5 weeks, with a study load of 40 hours per week. This covers the 1200 most common words in Dutch. There is also the intermediate course (“The Yellow Book”/”Het Gele Boek”) that follows on from this one. After you have done these two courses, you will speak enough Dutch that your language will take off, because you will be using it confidently every day, reading the papers, and following Dutch TV.I didn’t do the official course myself (work didn’t give me 5 weeks off to study Dutch when I moved there!), but my partner did when she finally joined me, and soon afterwards she was better than I was even though I’d been working my butt off in my evening classes for a year, and living in a Dutch household. Seeing what she, and the other students I knew who had done the course, could achieve, I then did the course on my own, and it was a revelation. This is the right way to learn a language! Vocab, practical usage, and intense practice and repetition. I have dipped into a number of languages and taken quite a few language courses, and the Delfse methode is by far the best way to learn to speak a new language quickly and confidently.Before I went to South America, I grabbed “De Delfse Methode: Spaans” (the Spanish version) and I was conversing in broken Spanish - but actually able to communicate! - from the moment I arrived.