A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many

A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my brain in interesting ways. • Verb comes at the end ... except when not. A dead-simple example: the phrase "because it is difficult" is translated as omdat het moelijk is. The verb is is here. And omdat means "because" and it has a synonym called want (yes, it's a Dutch word). However, the-verb-comes-at-the-end rule doesn't apply to want, so the same Dutch phrase with want becomes: want het is moelijk (here, the verb sits in the 'normal' position). This subject/verb order can get really complex. • Split verbs. The verb "invite" (uitnodig[en]) in the sentence "I invite you all" gets split in two: "in" and "vite"; and the first part goes to the end of the sentence: "I vite you all in" The sentence in Dutch reads: Ik nodig jullie allemaal uit (notice the verb split: nodig ... uit). My frustration here is hilariously expressed by Mark Twain in his essay[1] on German. NOTE! — Before you take offence at the title[1], Mark Twain was an accomplished German speaker, he wrote this in a fun spirit! "The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance [...]" • • • And there are many other subtleties like "inversion", and usage of grammatical articles ("de" vs. "het") is arbitrary enough that there's an entire website[2] that helps you learn which article to use when. [1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html — "The Awful German Language" [2] https://www.welklidwoord.be/ https://www.welklidwoord.be/ — the website name means "which article is it?"