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Lesson Transcript

Hallo allemaal! Ik heet Marleen. Hi everybody! I’m Marleen.
Welcome to DutchPod101.com’s “Nederlands in 3 minuten”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Dutch.
In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your schedule. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verbs “to be”, zijn, and “to come”, komen.
When you meet a new person in the Netherlands, they might ask you Waar kom je vandaan? which is the equivalent of "Where are you from?" It literally means “Where do you come from?” in Dutch.
Let’s break it down.
Waar means “where”, and you’re familiar with je, the word for "you."
Kom is a conjugated form of the verb “to come”, komen.
Finally, vandaan means "from".
Altogether, it's Waar kom je vandaan?
[slowly] Waar kom je vandaan?
Answering this question is very easy! You just say Ik ben, which means "I am", and then your nationality.
Ik is "I" and
"ben" is the "to be" verb zijn conjugated for "I".
For example- Ik ben Amerikaans, means “I am American”.
[slowly] Ik ben Amerikaans.
Just replace Amerikaans with your own nationality.
"I am German" is Ik ben Duits.
"I am Italian" is Ik ben Italiaans.
"I am Brazilian" is Ik ben Braziliaans.
You could also answer with Ik kom uit Duitsland, which means “I come from Germany”, for example. Ik kom means “I come”, and uit means “from”.
In that case, you would also have to change the nationality to the name of the country, like we do in English, so “I come from" "Ik kom uit" and then the name of the country.
For example, if you are from France you say,
Ik kom uit Frankrijk
[slowly] Ik kom uit Frankrijk
Or if you are from Australia you say-
Ik kom uit Australië
[slowly] Ik kom uit Australië
To return the question you can simply say -
En jij? which is "And you?”
Now it’s time for Marleen’s Insights.
You’ll find that the nationalities in Dutch are very similar to their English equivalents. Also note that we write nationality names and country names with a capital letter, just like in English! Easy, right?
In this lesson, we learned how to talk about nationalities.
Next time, we’ll continue to study the verb zijn and we'll see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in Dutch? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Nederlands in 3 minuten lesson.
Tot ziens!

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