Once every two weeks I create a quiz for my newsletter. On this page, I collect all of them. Have a go, if you dare.

Answers quiz 4

She’s a photograph

Should be: She’s a photographer

I did my second interview on Monday (I haven’t had time to write the article yet, mea culpa!). My interviewee and I agreed that there were some mistakes Dutch people make that will make even the politest native speakers snigger (= gniffelen). A little later, I came up with a great example: mixing up “fotograaf” and “photograph”. Makes me smile every time. More here.

She takes photo’s

Should be: She takes photos

Perhaps the commonest mistake in the written English of Dutch people. And it is one that can be fixed by memorising one simple rule: there is never an apostrophe in an English plural (with one insignificant exception)

You’ll see this one in my quiz more often. It is a ubiquitous (= alomtegenwoordig) mistake, which is made by many native speakers, too.

I found her contact details on the Internet (capital i)

Should be: I found her contact details on the internet (lower case i) (even better: I found her contact details online)

For many years, Microsoft Word and other text-editing programs would tell you that the word “internet” should be written with a capital letter. It no longer does so (not in my 2019 version, anyway, I just checked), and with good reason. Most English publications stopped capitalising the word “internet” many years ago, and since November 2022, even the reasonably conservative Garner’s Modern English Usage has conceded that the i should be lower case:

The customer is king

When I first heard “the customer is king” I thought it was an incorrect translation of “de klant is koning”. Far too literal. The idiom as I had always used it was “the customer is always right”.

But having looked into a database of English texts from newspapers and other online publications, it seems that “the customer is king” is truly a much-used and well-understood phrase in English. It is more common in American English than in British English, which might be why I hadn’t heard it before.

I have not been able to find where it came from (only conjecture (= giswerk) without sources), my own guess is that it came to America with German immigrants translating their phrase “der Kunde ist König”.

Answers quiz 3

Question 1

It’s a Monday, the first of the month, and you get an invitation for a party “next weekend”. Is the party going to be in the weekend directly after the week you are in, the 6th and 7th of the month, or a week later, the 13th and 14th of the month?

If your answer is “no idea”: congratulations! That’s the right answer.

In general, older Britons would call the 6th and the 7th “next weekend” whereas younger Britons would call that one “this weekend”. The younger generation would call the 13th and 14th “next weekend”, with older people calling that one “the weekend after next”. But there are plenty of older and younger people who do it the other way around, and the study that I got this data from (carried out in 2021) was only run in the UK.

I don’t have numbers, but from my experience, usage is also mixed in other English-speaking countries.

So what can you do? One simple rule: always note the date.

Read more here

Question 2

How would a native speaker interpret these sentences?

Eventually, I will go home.

Te zijner tijd ga ik weer naar huis. Read more here.

His death was dramatic.

Zijn dood was theatraal. Read more here.

He’s a fanatical cyclist.

Hij is een fanatisch fietser. (Beetje doorgedraaid, dus). Read more here.

Question 3

The idiom depicted here is the same in English and Dutch. What’s the idiom?

De baby met het badwater weggooien. To throw out the baby with the bathwater. Read more here.

Answers quiz 2

The thing I find strange is that he never told me.

No comma!

There are two comma rules, one for Dutch, and one for English, that lead to opposite results.

The Dutch rule is always add a comma between two finite verbs (=persoonsvormen). This means the translation of the sentence above becomes

Wat ik raar vind, is dat hij het me nooit verteld heeft.

Note the comma. It has to be there, and its obligatory presence has been drilled into Dutch speakers at school.

English has a different word order: two finite verbs can never follow one another, meaning they have no use for the above rule.

Instead, English has a different rule that just happens to lead to the opposite result in this kind of sentence. This rule states: never separate a subject from its finite verb (persoonsvorm) with a comma. In the sentence above, “the thing I find strange” is the subject that belongs to the finite verb “is”, meaning these cannot be separated by a comma.

Because Dutch people have the Dutch sentence and rule in mind, they often put a comma between the subject and its finite verb. To many English speakers, including me, this is quite a glaring mistake, because just like the above rule was drilled into Dutch speakers’ brains at school, our comma rule was drilled into us. Unfortunate!

More information on commas here.

Our kitchen isn’t open yet, but you can order bar snacks.

You cannot translate the Dutch word “kleine kaart” with “small menu”. For an English speaker, a “small menu” is a menu that is literally small. Click here for some pictures that I took after being frustrated one too many times by the English versions of Dutch restaurant websites.

Perhaps you were in doubt about the kitchen being open in English. This is one of those phrases that is the same in Dutch and in English. Just like in Dutch, in English an “open kitchen” can be a kitchen in a house that is part of the living room, but it can also refer to the opening hours of a restaurant’s kitchen.

I’m feeling fit, because I’ve been working out on my exercise bike.

Hometrainer is one of those Dutch words that sounds English but isn’t. More info here.

You’ll get your warm round of applause, it’s just a question of time!

This sentence may have sounded too Dutch, but there was only one slight problem: we say “a round of applause” rather than just *an applause*. It is no problem for a round of applause to be warm in English, and “a question of time” is also correct English, despite some journalists thinking it is not.

Answers quiz 1

Please join our writers’ room next week.

A writer’s room would be a room for just one writer. Because there will be more than one writer, the word you need is “writers”, not “writer”. To put “writers” in the possessive form, you add an apostrophe: “writers’ room”. Read more here.

My cat is very playful.

The word “full” (=vol) is spelled with two l’s in English. Any other word ending with “ful”, like “wonderful”, “successful” or “playful” only gets one l. Read more here.

I’ve put our appointment in my calendar.

“Agenda” is a false friend. In British English, the word “agenda” only refers to the talking points set before a meeting. (American English does sometimes use “agenda” to mean appointment book, which is why I used the word “holiday” instead of “vacation”.)

The little book called an “agenda” in Dutch is referred to as an appointment book, a planner, or (British, and slightly outdated by now) a diary. “Calendar” is the safest option, because everybody will understand it, and because the electronic appointment planners you most likely use at work are called “calendars”. Read more here.

The girl, wearing her favorite gray face mask, scowled at me.

I put this one in for the advanced English speakers among you. Even many native speakers would not notice the problem here, unless they are speakers of American English.

This sentence is in American English, you can tell by the spelling of “favorite” (UK English: “favourite”) and “gray” (UK English “grey”, though this difference is less strict).

In American English, the word “frown” refers to the mouth, not the eyebrows (hence “turn that frown upside down!”). If someone is wearing a face mask, you would not be able to see them frown. When talking about the eyebrows, an American says “scowl” or “furrow the brow”. Read more here.

Extra points

Extra points to you if you were bothered by the British word “holiday” in one sentence and the American “favorite” in the next!

Heddwen Newton is an English teacher and a translator from Dutch into English. She thinks about languages way too much, for example about how strange it is that these little blurb things are written in the third person.

Heddwen has two passports, two children, two smartphones, two arms, two legs, and two email newsletters.

Meer lezen? GA NAAR EEN WILLEKEURIG ARTIKEL