Learn the sounds before the words

Hiragana came first in Japanese. In Dutch, the alphabet is already yours, so the gate is narrower: about thirty letter combinations, one spelling rule and a few consonant habits. Learn them and every Dutch word you ever meet is readable, sayable and recognisable when you hear it.

Dutch spelling is nearly phonetic. A spelling tells you the sound almost every time, which is the opposite of English. That is why this step is short, and why it comes first: vocabulary learned with wrong sounds has to be unlearned later. You would learn huis as “hoo-iss” and never hear it in a sentence.

This is the whole of Step 1. Nothing else is needed, and nothing after it is built yet. Steps are gates: Step 2, the first words, opens when the checkpoint is cleared.

How to use this

1. Read the guide once, chapter by chapter. About forty minutes. Press every play button and say every word out loud, badly. Nobody is listening.
2. Take a lesson. Five cards at a time. A lesson re-teaches each card, then quizzes you until you get each one right.
3. Come back when reviews are due. Each card returns after 2 hours, then 4, then 8, then a day. Get it right four times in a row and it is Guru. Get it wrong and it drops back.
4. When everything is Guru, take the reading test. Then Step 2.

Most words are spoken by native Dutch speakers, recorded for Wikimedia Commons; the caption under each play button says who. Words without a recording use a synthetic voice: Xander from the Netherlands, with the hard g, or Ellen from Flanders, with the soft one. Switch voices in Settings. Where a voice and the guide disagree on ui or g, trust the guide.