German vs Dutch: which should you learn?

Is Dutch easier than German for English speakers?

By the US Foreign Service Institute's measure, yes. It puts Dutch in Category I, its group of languages closest to English, at 24 weeks of full-time training, alongside Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and Portuguese. German is in Category II at approximately 36 weeks, half as long again. The FSI doesn't give reasons, and its students aim at professional fluency, but the grammar points the same way.

• Articles. Dutch has two words for "the", de and het, and they don't change with a noun's role in the sentence. German has der, die and das, which also become den, dem or des. In the free A1 chapters of the Contos German library, five of those six forms already appear.
• Word order. Much the same in both: the verb second in a main clause and at the end of a subordinate clause. Learn it for one language and you have it for the other.
• Long words. Both write compounds as one word, but German beginner text has more long ones. In the free A1 chapters, words of 13 letters or more appear about 7.2 times per 1,000 words in German and about 2.4 times in Dutch.

Dutch has hurdles of its own, mostly in sound, such as its throaty g. For German's harder parts, see is German hard to learn? and our German pronunciation guide.

How similar are German and Dutch, word for word?

Close enough to guess, not close enough to swap. We compared the free A1 chapters of the Contos German and Dutch libraries, 24 chapters each, written separately with different plots. Of the 100 most common word forms in each, character names excluded, only 6 are spelled the same: alles, die, er, in, ja and Oma. Two of those are traps. Dutch die means that or those, and Dutch er means there, not he (he is hij).

Most of the common words are relatives that differ by a sound or two, and many of the differences follow a pattern. The Dutch Language Union (Taalunie) dates the split to around the year 600, when a sound shift in the east, the High German consonant shift, turned p at the start of a word into pf (German Pferd, Dutch paard, horse). Similar shifts explain pairs throughout the beginner chapters:

Café scenes show how close everyday sentences run. Here is one from the German A1 crime story The Wallet:

Chapter 2 of the Dutch A1 romantic comedy Engaged by Mistake opens with Sophie zit in een café in Amsterdam. Ze drinkt koffie en wacht. (Sophie is sitting in a café in Amsterdam. She drinks coffee and waits.) Sitzt and zit, trinkt and drinkt, Kaffee and koffie, und and en: a German reader can follow the Dutch line on sight, and the reverse is true too.

Which language is more useful for you?

German is far bigger. With 100 million native speakers, German is the most widely spoken language in Europe, according to Germany's Federal Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office's 2020 survey of German as a foreign language counted more than 15.4 million learners worldwide. Dutch has about 24 million speakers, according to the Dutch Language Union: about 17 million in the Netherlands, 6.5 million in Belgium and 400,000 in Suriname. It is an official language in six countries, including Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.

• Choose German for Germany, Austria or Switzerland, for study at a German university, or for the larger job market, media and literature.
• Choose Dutch for the Netherlands or Flanders, for a Dutch-speaking partner or family, or if you want the quicker route to a second language.
• Undecided? Read chapter 1 of a story in each and keep the one you want to finish. Over a year, motivation matters more than twelve weeks of FSI time.

Mind the variety, too. Contos teaches Germany German, with stories set in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart, and Netherlands Dutch, with stories set in places like Amsterdam, Maastricht and on the Wadden islands.

Should you learn both, and in which order?

Both is realistic, but not at once. The overlap that helps you later blurs the two at the start: zit turns into sitzt halfway through a sentence. Get the first language to a solid B1, where you read stories comfortably, before starting the second.

Dutch first is quicker by the FSI's numbers and leaves German's word order already familiar. German first is the harder road but the bigger reward, and Dutch afterwards feels like a shortcut, with fewer forms of "the" to worry about.

Contos teaches both, with the same structure: 48 series from A1 to B2, every chapter ending on a cliffhanger, and chapters 1 and 2 of every series free. Several series ideas appear in both libraries, written separately for each language, such as Engaged by Mistake, The Wallet and The Night Train to Vienna. Each account has one learning language, so pick one to start. To sample Dutch, open an A1 Dutch story in the web app.