The two Dutch language learning books I ordered arrived today; one’s a success, the other, not so much. The success is Assimil’s Dutch with Ease; I’ve little to say about it at this point, other than it looks as good as all of the other Assimil stuff I’ve used or am using currently.
The not-so-great success – okay, I’ll be honest, the failure – is a Prisma Nederlands-Engels dictionary. It’s for speakers of Dutch, but I figured as long as it gave the Dutch words with English translations, I’d be okay; I primarily wanted it to do word lists.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take one thing into consideration: I never imagined that just because it’s for native speakers of Dutch, that none of the Dutch noun genders would be listed. So while I can look up words while reading with it, I still won’t know whether they’re de or het nouns.
I requested the New Routledge Dutch Dictionary via OhioLINK at my university, and it came in today. It lists the genders of nouns, and seems like a really nice dictionary. Unless I can find something of similar quality with a similar price, I’ll probably be picking up a copy soon.
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I made that mistake when learning Dutch. I recommend the Van Dale Basiswoordenboek Nederlands as that is a basic dictionary aimed at children older than 10, it gives the Genders and simple Dutch definitions of the words. Together with the Prisma book you have a good combination.
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If you want to a good dictionary, you should get the ‘Van Dale’ dictionary. I am a native Dutch speaker and use it a lot too. It’s very complete. The only downside of it is that it is quite costly.
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