100 words ≈ half of everyday DutchA handful of words do most of the work in any language, a pattern known as Zipf’s law. Dutch frequency lists built from real speech and subtitles put the hundred commonest words at roughly half of everything said. The exact share moves with the corpus and with whether you count word forms or dictionary entries, so treat this as an approximation rather than a measurement.
Learn Dutch. One word at a time.
1One word. brood, tikkie, gezellig. Words you already walk past every day.
2The true story. Where it came from, and why the Dutch say it that way.
3The sentences. What you would say at the counter. Not “the cat is on the table.”
koffie
coffee
fiets
bicycle
tikkie
a payment request
gezellig
no English for this
hagelslag
chocolate sprinkles
pinnen
to pay by card
lekker
good, nice, tasty…
trap
stairs
storing
fault, disruption
DamGoodDutch — Dutch that survives the supermarket