Learn how to ask about someone's age
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| Hallo allemaal! Ik heet Gabriella. Hi everybody! I’m Gabriella. |
| Welcome to DutchPod101.com’s “Nederlands in 3 minuten”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Dutch. |
| In the last two lessons, we learned the main usages of the verb zijn, which means “to be” in Dutch. |
| In this lesson, we are going to learn a third practical usage of this verb. We will use zijn to talk about your age. |
| It’s normal for young people in the Netherlands to ask each other’s ages. But it might be risky to ask people over 25! |
| If someone asks you Hoe oud ben jij? just know that it means “How old are you?” in Dutch. |
| [slowly] Hoe oud ben jij? |
| Now you have to answer with your age! In Dutch, you use the same verb we learned in the two previous lessons, zijn, “to be”. |
| Here are some examples. |
| “I am 18” is Ik ben achttien. |
| “I am 20” is Ik ben twintig. |
| “I am 25” is Ik ben vijfentwintig. |
| “I am 40” is Ik ben veertig |
| and so on. |
| Do you notice the pattern here? We started with the sentence Ik ben achttien, “I am 18”. |
| Ik ben means “I am”. This is the conjugated version of zijn. |
| Achttien is “18”. We learned about numbers back in lessons 6 and 7. |
| [slowly] Ik ben achttien. |
| Sometimes, Dutch people add two more words to this sentence to indicate that they are explicitly talking about age and not something else. |
| So you might hear Dutch people adding the words jaar oud after the age. The word jaar means “years,” and oud means “old.” |
| Ik ben twintig jaar oud. “I’m 20 years old”. |
| [slowly] Ik ben twintig jaar oud. |
| But please pay attention - in Dutch, we most often use the singular form of jaar, so we literally say “year old” instead of “years old”. |
| Let’s look at the sentence again. |
| Ik ben vierendertig jaar oud. is “I am 34 years old.” |
| [slowly] Ik ben vierendertig jaar oud. |
| Now it’s time for Gabriella's Insights. |
| If you are asked your age but don’t want to tell the person asking your age, you can simply say that “That’s a secret”. In Dutch, that’s- |
| Dat is een geheim. |
| [slowly] Dat is een geheim. |
| So, in this lesson, we have learned how to talk about your age using the verb zijn. Next time, we’ll learn how to use the verb hebben, which means “to have”, to talk about possessions. |
| I'll be waiting for you in the next Nederlands in 3 minuten lesson. |
| Tot ziens! |
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