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🇳🇱 → 🇩🇪

How easy is German for Dutch speakers?

Going from Dutch to German (Deutsch) has a composite linguistic distance of 22% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

22% distance FSI Cat II — ~900 hours
Lexical similarity
80%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
69%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
25%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
100%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇳🇱 Dutch
Het kind speelt in de tuin met zijn hond.
🇩🇪 German
Das Kind spielt im Garten mit seinem Hund.
🇳🇱 Dutch
De winter is lang maar de zomer is warm en mooi.
🇩🇪 German
Der Winter ist lang aber der Sommer ist warm und schön.

Curated cognates between Dutch and German

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

Other easy languages for Dutch speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Dutch:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Dutch and German. No signup.