mini-review

This Dutch vocabulary app has a wide range of words and phrases for all levels, and pairs a fairly extensive range of teaching methods with impressive customizability.

The vocabulary is organised by level (A1–C1) or by theme (dating, slang, restaurants, opinions and feelings…). In total, there are 5,000+ words and phrases for you to learn. You can also add your own vocabulary to create personalised or specialised courses.

Once you’ve selected your course or topic, it’s time to start learning. The app will introduce you to 14 pieces of vocabulary, with nouns accompanied by the definite article (de/het). You’ll see a picture, the text and the translation, while audio recordings from different speakers will help you familiarise yourself with the pronunciation.

Then, you’ll do a series of games to reinforce your memory. These include matching the translation to the audio recording, spelling the word(s), multiple choice quizzes, anagrams and more. If you get a question wrong, you get extra attempts.

Spaced-repetition reviews will help you remember words over the long term, and you can adjust how big the gap between reviews is, too.

The most impressive thing about this app is the customisability. Want to work on your spelling? Go to the settings, and change it so that the only game is a spelling one. Want something a little easier? Switch it to only give you multiple choice questions, and reduce the amount of vocabulary you learn prior to doing reviews.

Since this app only teaches you vocabulary out of context, it’s best to use it as a supplementary resource. However, it can be a decent, if dry, addition to your language-learning arsenal.

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The Dutch Verbs Companion is a handy app for all Dutch learners. It does exactly what it says on the tin: give you all the information you need about Dutch verbs.

The app covers 580+ verbs. Each entry contains the verb’s meaning, type (regular/irregular, auxiliary, etc.), detailed yet easy-to-parse conjugation tables, example sentences and related words. The only thing missing is audio recordings – but in the resource’s defence, the focus is on grammar, not vocabulary.

The Notes section, meanwhile, provides concise and useful grammatical explanations for verb types, classes, tenses, personal pronouns and more.

All things considered, The Dutch Verbs Companion is an excellent resource for checking conjugations on the go.

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Het and de, the two Dutch ways of saying “the”. Which one you use will depend on the noun’s grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), whether it’s singular or plural, whether it’s a diminutive and more.

Enter Flash Your Dutch! This app presents you with a series of nouns and gets you to guess whether it needs het or de. The more you get a noun right, the less frequently that noun appears.

You can narrow down the noun list by difficulty level and category, or you can dive straight into the 1,800+ words. An English-language “Tips” page will also help you work out the patterns behind whether a word needs het or de.

Flash Your Dutch! may be simple, but it’s invaluable. De and het can be challenging, especially if you’ve already learnt a lot of vocabulary without paying attention to the grammatical gender. But this app will help you remember which article you really need.

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Dutch Listening & Speaking/Learn Dutch is an app-based course with tons of lessons for you to work through. Unfortunately, it left us disappointed. It’s focused on memorising specific phrases and dialogues instead of building your own sentences.

Each lesson begins with a dialogue. Next, you’ll listen to the phrases individually and get a chance to record yourself saying them. Now it’s time for the exercises. You’ll match the writing to the audio, put words in the right order, fill in the gaps and pick the right translations for audio clips. In most of these exercises, you’ll hear an audio recording with the answer before you do them.

Finally, it’s time to recreate the dialogue – but don’t get too excited. Either you’ll listen to the correct phrase before selecting it from a choice of three, or you’ll see the correct phrase and then practise speaking it. With the latter, speech-recognition software means you’ll get some feedback on how good your pronunciation is.

The most frustrating think about this course is the fact that you’re only taught set phrases from one specific dialogue, with no opportunity to customise them. For example, in the lesson “Where are you from?”, the only answer you learn is “I am from California.” You’re also unlikely to pick up a good understanding of Dutch grammar from these exercises.

This app has an immense amount of content, with over 200 lessons at the elementary level alone, as well as listening tasks with short stories and news stories. But it comes across as quantity over quality. We would opt for Babbel (review) or DutchPod101 (review) over this course.

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This flashcard-based app will in theory teach you 3,500 Dutch nouns, adjectives and verbs. It’s slickly designed, but we found it slightly dull and demotivating.

The vocabulary is broken into 50-word sections, some of which are only available via collecting points or paying for premium access. In each 50-word section, you’ll see a series of flashcards and choose whether to mark them as remembered/learned or needing further review.

There are also a small number of games to support your learning: Hive, De Het, and Fallee. These are a fun addition and, if you ask us, the best part of the app. Frustratingly, though, you have to watch two video ads every time you get an answer wrong – or you can give up and start over again, in which case you just have to watch one video.

This isn’t a badly designed app, but we would be inclined to just use it for the games. For flashcard-based learning, we would opt for Learn Dutch Vocabulary Free or Drops instead. The first is more customisable; the second is more engaging.

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