Learning Dutch? Watch out for these 10 false friends

Whether you’re an English speaker or you’ve mastered English as a second language, you have a great advantage when learning Dutch. Dutch and English are like brother and sister in the 6.000-year-old family tree of Indo-European languages. Other close relatives are German, Frisian and South African.

These languages belong to the same family, and so they share a lot of words. Many words are similar: pen, apple, finger, and hand, for example, and this makes it easy to build your Dutch vocabulary. However, there is one "but". You need to be aware that some words may look similar in both languages, yet have different meanings. Linguists call these words "false friends". 

Expand your Dutch vocabulary with a course from Direct Dutch

1. Slim/slim

When someone is slim in Dutch, they are clever, bright or smart and not slender. The Dutch word for slender is slank. There is a kind of cheese spread in the Dutch supermarkets which has the brand name slankie. It generally contains 25% less salt and 65% less fat than full-fat cheese spread. It may help you in your slimming diet, but a real cheese lover may find its taste doubtful.

2. Brief/brief

In Dutch, de brief (plural brieven) means a letter, whereas brief in English means short. So een korte brief in English is "a brief letter". "In brief" in Dutch is kortom (in short). The word "letter" itself can also lead to confusion, because in Dutch a letter is a character like a, b, c and so on. The plural letteren refers to literature, and "a (wo)man of letters" is een geleerde.

3. Sensible/Sensibel

A sensible person in English is someone who possesses prudence, such as in the sentence "Robin is a sensible and capable child", perhaps a child with "common sense". In Dutch, "common sense" translates as gezond verstand (literally "healthy sense"). Een sensibel kind, however, is a child that is susceptible to impressions, or sensitive. Another word for sensibel in Dutch is gevoelig, gevoel meaning feeling or emotion.

4. Stout/stout

When you think of "a stout child" in English, you see a rather fat or heavily-built figure in your mind’s eye, whereas een stout kind is naughty or misbehaving, even though the child may be rather skinny.

5. Actual/actueel

Actueel nieuws is news that is hot, current or of topical interest, whereas "actual news" in English means that the news item is factual and real. Actual figures are reële cijfers in Dutch and not "current figures". Watch out: figure and figuur can be false friends as well. Dutch figuur does not relate to a number but to a person's bodily shape.

6. Eventually/eventueel

Eventually, after a hard day’s work, I arrived home. In this case, eventually means "in the end" or "at long last". If you say in Dutch: Als ik eventueel om zes uur niet thuis ben, eet dan zonder mij (In the event that I am not at home at six, start dinner without me). Eventueel means "possibly" or "in the event that". Very confusing, indeed.

7. Copy/kopie

Geef mij een kopie van dat boek and "give me a copy of that book" will produce different results. A Dutchie will give you a photocopy of the book, and an English speaker will give you the book itself.

8. Global/globaal

The word globaal in Dutch means "rough" or "broad", as in globale cijfers (rough figures) or een globaal overzicht (a broad outline). In English, global relates to the whole world, as in "global economy". The Dutch would use mondiaal in that case, or they would say wereldeconomie (world economy).

9. Sin/zin

Ik heb zin in een biertje has nothing to with the English word sin. It means: "I feel like having a beer". The Dutch word for sin is zonde. When the glass of beer falls out of your hands on the floor, a Dutchman may exclaim wat een zonde, which does not translate as "what a sin" but as "what a shame".

10. Starve/sterven

This is my favourite false friend. Clearly, the two verbs are closely related. When you are hungry, you may say "I’m starving". In Dutch, you can say: Ik kom om van de honger (I am dying of hunger). Sterven means "to die" or "to pass away" and the English "to starve" is specifically used to indicate "dying of hunger", which in Dutch is verhongeren.

Sanity-check your words

There are many more false friends out there, so if a Dutchie says something nonsensical, it could well be due to a false friend you don't yet know. Learning from one another’s mistakes can be a lot of fun. It enriches your knowledge of the new language.