I rather meant, that definition #2 should be definition #1. I.e. the most reasonable order of definitions is backwards.
Another one, which seems strange is hulp to which I think “help, noun” is all that’s required. Same for “u”.
Thanks.
I rather meant, that definition #2 should be definition #1. I.e. the most reasonable order of definitions is backwards.
Another one, which seems strange is hulp to which I think “help, noun” is all that’s required. Same for “u”.
Thanks.
Actually “heen” would correspond with “forwards” in that expression (and word order reversed).
“heen” mostly expresses direction, like “hin” in German.
Van Dale would disagree:
Admittedly, I have only read one book in Dutch (but it was quite long ), but I read the word “heen” often enough (and know German VERY well) that it was clear to me that “heen” in Dutch has pretty much the same meanings as “hin” in German, and they both mean “going TO a place”, not going backwards.
The “backwards” meaning only comes about in phrases like “hin und her” (German for ‘back and forth’, ‘to and fro’) and “heen of weer”.
You are right! I got them the wrong way round because of the English phrase! But it was clear to me that “heen of weer” is the same as “hin und her”, like the archaic “hither and thither” (“hit och dit” in Swedish).
The “weer” is the ‘backwards’ part, not the “heen”, right???
Dat klopt! (That’s right!)
The classic Dutch song “Veerpont” also known as “Heen en weer” by the late Drs. P (not known for his singing voice but for his lyrics).
This is how the translation of “heen” looks at this very moment:
I wrote the English translations of “heen of weer” the wrong way round on purpose so that people realize that the DUTCH way of saying this uses a different order to the English way.
Thanks for the song tip! I love using songs to learn languages, it has been a huge help with Swedish
Meaning 2. is the most common. I don’t exactly what is meant by 1. but it looks a bit odd to me because “heengaan” means “to demise”.
If you scroll up, you will see a screenshot of the entry from Van Dale that I used for this entry. They have the “away, gone” meaning first, so I trusted them!
But it corresponds to what I noticed whilst reading and to the German “hin” that the most common meaning is “there, on the way there, out”.
You would have thought that Van Dale would rank the entries in such a way that the most common usage appeared first
So I am very happy to have your input, Duaal! Thanks for your time!
So you don’t like the addition of the phrase “en bedankt voor je hulp”?
Or “wie bent u?” for the entry for “u”?
Why?
It is not a very clear entry. Well, some words are not so easily translated into English.
Graag gedaan en welterusten @amanda-norrsken.
For both. “Formal You” is as precise as it gets. Adding “who are you” doesn’t clarify or add anything to this entry. Same for the “hulp”. If you want to provide examples memrise database has a separate field to provide those.
Personally, I don’t think that adding simple everyday phrases to a common word makes it more difficult for learners to learn the word in question; on the contrary, I think most learners will benefit and be happy to get “more for their money” when doing this course.
A lot of learners like to learn words embedded in phrases. By adding basic phrases, learners on this course get extra exposure to words like “bedankt” and “voor” and “je”, or to the words for “who” and “are”. It is difficult for me to imagine how adding these little phrases to the definitions can be a bad thing.
The separate field allows you to add phrases, but the words come out very very small and are easily overlooked; in the definition they are not.
I have received no other objections to these additions and, on the Swedish courses I curate, these additions were welcomed. Seeing as there have been no other objections and you already know all the words in this course off by heart so the addition of these words can’t be harming you either, I will leave the phrases in and, in all likelihood, may add more when I next read a Dutch book.
I understand that they might be a cause of minor irritation to you as they have changed the look of the course, but I think they are helpful so they are staying in.
We will just have to agree to disagree on this one.
Sidenote (not really important for the course):
I’d say the German “hin” is nearly equivalent to the Dutch word “heen”. Like in Dutch it can be combined with other prepositions to indicate a direction: “dahin”, “hierhin”, “dorthin”. These kinds of word combinations are to be found in various Germanic languages. English “thither” “whither”, “hither” sound a bit old-fashioned but show the same principle of word formation.
German “hin- und her” is best translated with “heen of weer” or “back and forth”. But beware of the false friend “hin und wieder”: “hin und wieder” does sound very much alike the Dutch idiom “heen of weer” but actually means something like “now and then”.
Thanks, Robert! That was my feeling about “heen” and “hin”, too, that they are used in a very similar way.
You’re missing the whole point You’re cluttering the main card. If you want to provide examples (which is great, don’t get me wrong) — memrise has capability to add extra columns with as many examples as you want. Cluttering the main card on the other hand makes the experience worse.
I am “only” a course contributor and I can’t add columns
So the only place I can add columns is either in the main entry or in mems.
I think most human brains can cope with more than one word at a time, though, so I don’t think a few extra words is “clutter” at all. In fact, I think a couple of extra words to put the new word in context are probably necessary.
For example, the Dutch words “wie” for “who” and “bent” for “are” actually didn’t really ‘click’ for me until I read the phrase “wie bent u?”, which is part of the reason I put that phrase in.
Trying to learn “wie” and “bent” on their own just did not work for me, but the phrase “wie bent u?” made it soooo much easier to remember those individual words.
So I am going to stick to this strategy and see what other feedback comes in.
Hi,
can we also do the following:
Sure! I’ll do that right away!
“eraan” was marked as an adverb, but now it is correctly described as a “pronominal adverb”.
I will leave in the phrase “ik kom eraan” as this phrase helps to distinguish this particular pronominal adverb from other similar ones.
Hi Amanda,
First, I’d like to thank you for helping out with keeping this course updated. I still remember you and your valuable comments from the Swedish courses
I have to say that I am not a fan of those extended dictionary-style definitions. If I remember well, it’s been in fact one of the things that have been removed by @V75 and myself and kept consistent in this course and its continuation. The preference was rather to seamlessly accept other translations, than to put long definitions on the main card. After all it’s a beginner course and one’s not expected to learn all the meanings of a word. We’ve spent a lot of time analysing how to make the course more user friendly without doing an overhaul that would completely change what it had been in the beginning: i.e. it’s based on a frequency list, so we only present single words, the way they appear on the list (as opposed to presenting them in a phrase or infinitive/neutral form, which sometimes would make more sense). This has worked well for us in the past, so I can just second the old comments of @V75 pointing out that other courses might be based on different principles. This does not mean that one or the other approach is better in all situations, but we felt like consistency is the key.
Well, the course is evolving and I will not be able to stop that, but I felt I need to leave a comment here.
Now, about two changes mentioned in the thread:
Note that probably the most common usage of “om” is in combination with “te”:
https://glosbe.com/nl/en/“om%20te”
hence the previous definition.
The exclamation mark on “klopt!” has been kept on purpose, as it’s mostly used as an exclamation (correct!), but if you prefer to remove it, you might want to add “(you) knock, (he) knocks” to the definition list.
Groetjes,
awrowhh
(lol, I’ve realised after posting this, that I reply in a 3 years old thread )