Unfortunately that means for each word you'll have to learn whether it's a "de" or a "het" word. It's a good thing, since masculine/feminine doesn't matter muc

Unfortunately that means for each word you'll have to learn whether it's a "de" or a "het" word. It's a good thing, since masculine/feminine doesn't matter much in the end (compared to e.g. German). Of course, it does matter for pronouns, but we get them wrong all the time anyway. My wife is an excellent non-native speaker of Dutch. She has most problems with finding the right prepositions and the usual phoneme differences (especially diphthongs). I can imagine that for a speakers of a non-Germanic languages V2 word order can also be strange (the finite verb is in the final position, however moves to the second position in declarative main clauses), and as a consequence what goes into the vor/mittel/nachfeld. (Note: I am not an expert in language acquisition at all, just extrapolating from a sample of 1 :)).