D: De

Or: "On the subject of articles".
(Articles? Really? Seems a bit strange of a word to indicate 'the' or 'a(n)'. My translator tells me it is so, however).

One of the major problems most foreign people encounter when learning the Dutch language has to do with our articles. You see, we have 'een', which is the same as the English 'a(n)'. Nothing much of an issue there. It starts getting problematic when we get to 'the'. You see, in Dutch, we have two different words for this. It can be indicated by either the word 'de' or 'het'. There is no clear distinction I'm aware of that indicates what to use when, and even natives sometimes have to guess at which to use when we come across words that are utterly unfamiliar to us. On the whole, though, either Dutch people have some sort of born affinity for recognizing which to use when or it's just been hammered into our subconcious from a young age. In short, one of the surefire ways to recognize a foreigner is to pay attention to what articles they use for what words. Apart from the often quite obvious accent, of course.

With a lot of other grammatical distinctions in our language (not for the articles - thank god) that are for whatever reason hazy to most natives - Really guys? They're perfectly clear to me! - it seems that the preferred way to get rid of the problems is to simply renounce the rules concerning them. I am strongly against this. It might have something to do with the fact that I'm one of those people who actually talks with grammatical correctness on a daily basis, but I just don't like the idea of our language being subject to 'dumbing down' simply because our natives can't be bothered to remember whether to use 'dan' or 'als'. It would basically be an incentive to stop caring about what you're saying - not the best solution in any situation.


~Levyathan.