READING SKILLS IN BUSINESS DUTCH

Unit 1: De economie van Nederland (2007)

Introduction

In this first Unit you will read a simplified text fragment from the Dutch version of Wikipedia Encyclopaedia. The fragment contains a short and general description of the Dutch economy.

Wikipedia Encyclopedia provides a good general introduction to the current economic situation of the Netherlands and Belgium, and offers articles on specific aspects of Belgian and Dutch society as well as links for further and more in-depth online reading.

Note: in this first Unit you will be able to test for yourself how well prepared you are for this course. After working your way through this Unit, you should go to the General Comments page where you will find some guidelines on how to assess yourself and some suggestions on how to proceed if you found the tasks in this Unit very hard.

Text Fragment

Nederland is een rijk land met een open economie. De basis van de Nederlandse economie is de buitenlandse handel. Ze is stabiel en heeft een lage inflatie. De belangrijkste industriële activiteiten zijn voedselverwerking, chemie, en de fabricage van elektrische apparaten.

Text in original version: Wikipedia @ http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederland#Economie

Task 1: Vocabulary

Print this page or write down the four sentences below. Read the sentences, underline the words you do not understand and write down the meaning of the words you already know. Do not panic if you recognise very few words. This exercise will help you to form a first idea of the meaning of the text fragment. Getting the meaning is ultimately the aim of anyone reading a text. For now you will probably find it hard to understand what is being said in the text fragments at the first reading. In the next Units your knowledge of Dutch vocabulary will gradually be expanded and you will learn how to break down and analyse texts and sentences so that their meaning becomes more easily understandable.

Nederland is een rijk land met een open economie.
De basis van de Nederlandse economie is de buitenlandse handel.
Ze is stabiel en heeft een lage inflatie.
De belangrijkste industriële activiteiten zijn voedselverwerking, chemie, en de fabricage van elektrische apparaten.

Click on the Vocabulary link to compare your answers and to find out the meaning of the words or phrases you do not understand.

Task 2: Word Groups

You will now have to divide the sentences into word groups using forward slashes. Why do this exercise? And what is a word group? A sentence is made up of word groups; a word group consists of one or more words that together make a meaningful unit. The following sentence consists of three word groups: de jongen / leest / het boek (the boy reads the book). When reading, it is important to know which words go together and form a word group. Note: in Dutch the word order of a word group sometimes differs from the word order in English. To read more about word order in Dutch, click here.

Example: Nederland / is / een rijk land / met een open economie.

Once you have finished, you may compare your answers with those on the Feedback Page .

Task 3: Grammar and Syntax

Now answer the following grammatical and syntactical questions. These questions will help you to analyse the structure of the sentences. Being able to do this is of extreme importance for anyone trying to get a reading knowledge of a language. A passive, but thorough, knowledge of Dutch grammar, a good understanding of how its sentences are structured and a dictionary, will allow you to tackle almost any text!

Sentence 1:

Identify the subject. If you do not know what a subject is, click here.
Identify the finite verb. If you first want to read more about finite verbs, click here.

Sentence 2:

Identify the subject.
Find all adjectives. If you do not know about adjectives in Dutch, click here.

Sentence 3:

Identify all finite verbs. What tense are they?
Find the coordinating conjunction. To first read more about coordinating conjunctions in Dutch, click here.
To which word in the previous sentence does ze refer back?

Sentence 4:

Identify the subject.
Identify a preposition. If you first want to read more about Dutch prepositions, click here.

After finishing the exercise you can check your answers on the Feedback Page, where you will also find some annotations to these questions. Do not panic if you found the questions too difficult or if you did not understand the terminology used; in that case just read the annotations carefully. Exercises of this type will return in every Unit, so there will be plenty of occasions to practise.

Task 4: Word Forms

You will now have to identify the head-words or stems of a series of words from the text. Why do this exercise? And what are head-words or stems? To find words in a dictionary, you need to know their head-words or stems. A dictionary does not include all forms of variable words, so it is important that you can identify their stem when you find them in a text and want to look up their meaning in a lexicon. Note: the stem of a substantive or noun is its singular form (if you want to read more on the singular and plural of nouns, click here); e.g. activiteiten > activiteit. The stem of a verb is its infinitive form (for more on the infinitive in Dutch, click here); e.g. heeft > hebben. The stem of an adjective is its uninflected form; e.g. buitenlandse > buitenlands. We also advise you to study the Dutch spelling rules, before starting this exercise.

Click here for this interactive, self-correcting exercise.

Task 5: Text Comprehension

Now that you have worked your way through the first four Tasks of this Unit, you should be able to answer a set of questions on the content of the text. This is again an interactive, self-correcting test. You will be given four statements in Dutch relating to the text. Some of them are correct, others incorrect. You are asked to tick the true or false answer boxes. Click here to enter the exercise.

Task 6: Glossary

Finally, you should try to memorise the following words from the text. Where possible, the word will be explained in Dutch first, which is then followed by an English translation. The word class will also be given. For words with more than one meaning, only the one encountered in the text fragment will be listed here. Note that when these words reappear in later Units, they will be considered to be known by the learner – but you can of course always look up their meaning in the Glossary!

1. zijn: [to be; verb]

2. rijk: met veel geld [rich; adj]

3. het land: een gebied met grenzen waarin een of meerdere volken samenleven [country; noun]

4. met: [with; prep]

5. open: niet gesloten [open; adj]

6. de basis: iets waarop iets steunt [basis; noun]

7. van: [of; prep]

8. Nederlands: iets wat Nederlands is, heeft te maken met Nederland [Dutch; adj]

9. buitenlands: buitenlandse zaken gaan over het buitenland [foreign; adj]

10. de handel: het kopen en verkopen [trade; noun]

11. hebben: bezitten [to have; verb]

12. laag: niet hoog [low; adj]