Short Stories in Dutch for Beginners

I am using Short Stories in Dutch by Olly Richards to boost my recognition of words I already know. By that I mean with repeated reading the time between reading and understanding the meaning of the Dutch word lessens. Another purpose in reading stories at my level (Advanced A2-Early B1) is to learn to recognize the make-up of compound words and intuit their meaning. The idea is to grasp the overall meaning of the story without immediately referring to a dictionary and grammar book. Richard’s book is perfect for this kind of exercise. Each story consists of short chapters. The illustration at the start of each story gives you visual cues about what will unfold. You read each chapter once without checking vocabulary. You go along to see how much you understand. After the first reading, you can take note of the words in bold font. These are the words listed after the end of each chapter. There the word lists includes translations of the meanings in English. There are also questions with multiple choice answers, all in Dutch, about the chapter you just read. So far, I find the set-up of each chapter and the experience of reading the stories an enjoyable way to learn and challenge myself.

A good way to learn some Dutch.

Vocab, listening and grammar is great for starting. The only problem is that many of the short stories are rather boring, but they are short stories for language learning, so it’s expected.

I have just completed my 415th day of Duolingo Dutch. I started in the middle of 2019 before a planned pleasure trip to Amsterdam with my family. We had a great time, with the canals, beer, food, museums, trams, and more. When I came back, I resumed my daily lessons. I even grabbed myself a tutor in the Netherlands for weekly 45-minute sessions. So--I wanted to read and listen to videos, but frankly, even as a diligent student, my reading level is still pretty low. Luckily, I found this book. It tells interesting stories, in three chapters, in just the right level of Dutch, with a bit of a stretch. The more complicated words are linked to definitions, and at the end of each chapter there are a few questions to answer and the word list. The author suggests you read though quickly the first time to get then gist, look over the words, and then try it again. It works. You FEEL like you're reading an actual grown-up book, and can relax and get comfortable with your new language. I regret that there is only one so far. Highly recommended.

Really appreciative of this book. It was a game changer and made learning Dutch a whole lot more fun than doing silly exercises on Duolingo. Literally had trouble putting the book down after I started. The author does a good job separating the stories into short chapters that really give you a sense of achievement as you progress through the book. The stories were a perfect level for an advanced beginner like myself. I was able to understand the vast majority of it, except for a few sentences or words here and there in addition to some of the bolded vocabulary words in each chapter.

Really a great motivation to feel like you have actually accomplished something in the Language. Would definitely recommend. I am really hopeful for a second volume.

While it's nice to have the book read out loud so that one can read along with it and learn to understand the language by listening, the audiobook is being read too fast, even though it's a normal speaking pace. And while in the Audible app one can slow it down a bit that makes the voice sound strange. I also didn't like that I could not replay sentences or paragraphs easily. I also found it very frustrating to listen to a lot of words I didn't know the meaning of at all. In researching language learning, I've come to the conclusion that a very good approach is to have something to listen to and read along with, but to have the audio at a slower pace. It might be good to have it both slow and normal speaking speeds, so one can learn to absorb it and hear it. Listening is essential to get correct pronunciation. It's also much faster to learn when you can study some grammar and vocabulary along with listening. I think one would also do well to pause the audio periodically and write down what one heard from memory, then, check to see if one got it correctly. To get anything out of this I'm going to have to take the text and use an online artificial intelligence voice generator two re-create it in shorter audio pieces so that I can replay them as I want as I go along. Listnr can do this in Dutch for $20 a month for 20,000 words.

Shiřr && to point

Excellent book for beginners with intent to get more practical reading experience .

Excellent resource for anyone learning Dutch who has already mastered some of the basics. The accompanying pictures in the text are helpful to add context to the stories.

A great start for me that’s new to Dutch. A challenge to read but a fun way to learn!

Great little book with stories in chapters with a summary (in dutch), a short vocab list, and a few questions. As a beginner with just a few weeks of learning with Duo Lingo and a couple of conversational podcasts, I am able to understand the gist of the stories and am slowly learning more words and phrases. I'm enjoying deciphering and spotting bits of sentences that make sense and allow me to get what is going on in the story.

I gifted this book to a friend studying Dutch with me and she loved it!