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
18,6 billion cups a year. Over half of them at work.
fiets
bicycle
The first thing you buy, and the first thing that gets stolen.
tikkie
a payment request
An app that became a verb. €2,40, six weeks late.
gezellig
no English for this
People reach for "cosy". It is not close.
hagelslag
chocolate sprinkles
On bread. At breakfast. By adults.
pinnen
to pay by card
Wave a fifty euro note at a bakery. Watch the queue.
lekker
good, nice, tasty…
Food, weather, sleep, a job. All of it can be lekker. One word, half a vocabulary.
trap
stairs
Terrifyingly steep, because 17th-century tax was charged on how wide your house was.
storing
fault, disruption
The word you learn on a train platform, and again at a card machine that has given up.
DamGoodDutch — Dutch that survives the supermarket