I’m surprised as I would expect these things to have been picked up long ago. The original course didn’t have articles, but they were added when DaftShadow took over curating the course. Awrowhh and I did a lot on synonyms.
People were very quick to indicate the gaps both in articles and with synonyms and a lot of work was done at this time.
But I’ll check the data base.
I am on a boat at the moment (I’m sailing in Holland for the summer) and can’t access the data base via a mobile. I’ll check it when I next have access to a laptop.
There are tons of other items with questionable value, like inflected adjectives (jong -> jonge; geweldig -> geweldige – this one is even worse, since the definitions differ).
This course was based on a frequency study. It has worked well for a very large number of beginners. The original forum is unfortunately not available anymore so you aren’t able to see how the course changed to meet learners needs.
I don’t think it will help learners who have completed it but still “water” it, if there are suddenly a lot of changes. It has been very settled for a very long time. So I think the vast majority of people are happy with it.
Why don’t you find another course that may suit you better? Memrise’s own courses are excellent.
This feels quite passive aggressive from your part (I can decide for myself which course I want to follow or not) and, honestly, disappointing.
As I said earlier, there are gaps and inconsistencies and showed you some. I never suggested a lot of changes.
But, whatever suits you better – if you don’t want to improve it – your choice.
Have fun sailing.
For all of you who have studied this excellent course…
…and now want to add some more words based on subtitle frequency such as presented in the excellent “Dutch - The 1,001 Most Common Words” and “Dutch - The 1,002 to 2,002 Most Common Words” but are worried about the unnecessary shared entries (duplicates) of these three courses, there’s a new kid in town:
This course lists the 1400 most common words in subtitles (based on the very same University of Ghent data) that are not yet to be found in the 5,000 words course. It should also list all words unique to both the “1,001” and “1,002 to 2,002” course. Both courses (+5000 & 1400) cover (at least) the 5000 most frequent words in subtitles. Please see level 1 (syllabus) of this course or consult the forum for more background information.
The word naar could be given a grammatical category, like the other words in the level it appears in. I am only a beginner, but it appears to have multiple meanings (like so many common words in any language), so it would be helpful to know that the translation of “to” is only applicable when the word naar is a preposition.
I would be willing to add the grammatical categories where they are missing. I think it would be helpful to add this information.
Would you be able to let me be a course contributor? As I don’t know Dutch very well yet, I would only add these things and promise not to mess about with the course!
My “qualifications”: I have been curating sehiralti’s four-part course, “8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words” for the last three years, so I know my way around these databases. I speak fluent German, too, and have a university degree and a translator’s diploma for German-English translations. I work part-time as an English teacher in adult education (and used to be full-time).
I uploaded thousands of audio files for the Swedish courses, so I can also check out if there are some better audio files on forvo.com or elsewhere and upload new ones. There were a couple of other words that could do with new audio files, so I would be happy to do that as I come across them.
It’s difficult to change the audio - all the audio is provided by native speakers. However I may be in Holland in the next month and can do it then. I live in England
I used forvo - the online pronouncing dictionary - for a lot of the words on the 8K+ Most Common Swedish Words and it was relatively straightforward to do. I have an account there and it’s really no big deal to download a file to my Chromebook and then upload it to memrise. I have already done this about four thousand times, LOL.
Are you British, by the way?
I am, but I live in Germany. I was on holiday in Amsterdam last summer and it made me curious about learning Dutch, which has been a lifelong dream of mine, believe it or not!
Well, there are still tons of english without “the”, some dutch singles without “de/het” (keer, dag, moeite) and one or two plurals with “de” in front (de dames). Most of the words would accept both, but some won’t.
