Aha! Interesting that you see the Dutch g sound as an English h; to me, the English h is... I can see some resemblance but, at the same time, it seems as different as the vowel in "seems" and "says". (Then again, perhaps someone from a language without an a-as-in-says sound would approximate that with e-as-in-seems.) I indeed won't say Dutch is a great language to the ears, it's neutral to me. It's the one I'm verbally best in due to nativeness, but I'd just as soon it gets replaced with something more widely spoken! Much more practical for everyone.
Thanks for writing this guide by the way, I expect these practical tips are going to help me with German :)
I found the language pretty bad sounding (almost ridiculous hhh-hhh sounds)
Now I am curious: what sounds are these? As in, what is it actually spelled like, because no word sounds like six "h"es after each other in English
This description rather reminds me of Icelandic, where I noticed in a video playing in a museum (geothermal energy exhibition) that they have the same word for "hand" as Dutch, except there is a huff after the word, like "hand'hh". It sounded as silly to me as it probably does to English speakers when putting a stray quiet gasp for air af...
Yeah I wish. I'm even from the region that has a lot of German influence in its dialect (as if Dutch itself wasn't Germanlike enough), but my innate comprehension is at the level where in high school I once looked through the list of words to study before a multiple-choice test, thought "yeah this looks doable, I'd know most of these and thus pass the test", and then went on to score worse than random on the actual test as the only student. (If only that teacher could see me living in Germany now; we'd have a good laugh.) And that's not even considering th... (read more)