Do Dutch people find learning how to speak German very easy? Are German and Dutch mutually intelligible?
I am a native speaker of German but I cannot speak Dutch and I never took any lessons. When somebody speaks Dutch I understand him or her to a certain extend and I can follow the gist of it, but about 30% of the content just flows by. From my experience Germans and Dutch can sometimes understand the other when one speaks German and the other Dutch, but only if both are used to hearing the others language and have some modicum of intelligence. (Being a trained linguist like I am really helps.) Reading Dutch websites is ok to me, but to really understand everything I need a translated version along with the original. If I lived in the Netherlands for 6 months and took lessons I would be quite fluent after a while, but I would still be learning a foreign language. I suppose the feeling is similar to a native speaker of English who reads an article in a French newspaper or magazine. There are many words you understand because their spelling is very similar to their English equivalents, but
