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Short Stories in Dutch for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Dutch the fun way!
An unmissable collection of eight unconventional and captivating short stories for young and adult learners of Dutch.
"Olly's top-notch language-learning insights are right in line with the best of what we know from neuroscience and cognitive psychology about how to learn effectively. I love his work - and you will too!" - Barbara Oakley, PhD, Author of New York Times bestseller A Mind for Numbers
Short Stories in Dutch for Beginners has been written especially for learners from high-beginner to low-intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, and most importantly - enjoyment! Mapped to A2-B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages, these eight captivating stories will both entertain you, and give you a feeling of progress when reading.
What does this book give you?
· Eight stories in a variety of exciting genres, from science fiction and crime to history and thriller - making reading fun, while you learn a wide range of new vocabulary
· Controlled language at your level to help you progress confidently
· Realistic spoken dialogues, to help you learn conversational expressions and improve your speaking ability
· Accessible grammar so you learn new structures naturally, in a stress-free way
· Beautiful illustrations accompanying each story, to set the scene and support your understanding
· Pleasure! Research shows that if you're enjoying reading in a foreign language, you won't experience the usual feelings of frustration - 'It's too hard!' 'I don't understand!'
Carefully curated to make learning a new language easy, these stories include key features that will support and consolidate your progress, including:
· A glossary for bolded words in each chapter
· A bilingual word list
· Full plot summary
· Comprehension questions after each chapter.
As a result, you will be able to focus on enjoying reading, delighting in your improved range of vocabulary and grasp of the language, without ever feeling overwhelmed. From science fiction to fantasy, to crime and thrillers, Short Stories in Dutch for Beginners will make learning Dutch easy and enjoyable.
- GenresLanguageShort Stories
232 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 26, 2019
285 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
August 4, 2022
Two stars for helping me better grasp Dutch. Lack of three stars for the extremely boring collection of short stories. I am relieved it’s over.
January 21, 2024
It took me around 4 months to complete this book of Dutch stories but it is worth every minute of my time. This is one of the rarest examples of storybooks in Dutch that you can use during your language journey with several levels integrated in the same book. There were quite a few useful phrases that can be used frequently and the choice of words was satisfactory. It is obvious that they put a lot of effort in the vocabulary which contains words of everyday use. My only complaint is that some of the stories was really unoriginal and dull, these could have been more interesting to keep the reader’s attention. Overall a great story book for Dutch novices.
July 13, 2020
I used this book to try and improve my Dutch reading skills and I would say I had moderate success with achieving this goal. The stories are written in pretty straightforward Dutch and are similar to those I have come across in children's book such as Jip en Janneke. However, I found the stories were a bit too basic for me and not very engaging to read. This made it somewhat difficult to finish this book as it is always hard to force yourself to read something you aren't actively engaged with. Special mention to the vocabulary list at the end of this book, it's pretty extensive and very useful.
Ultimately I read this book to improve my Dutch reading skills and to some degree I achieved this goal. However, I can't help but feel that my Dutch would have improved more if I was reading stories I was enthusiastic about.
Ultimately I read this book to improve my Dutch reading skills and to some degree I achieved this goal. However, I can't help but feel that my Dutch would have improved more if I was reading stories I was enthusiastic about.
March 1, 2024
This is the dullest book with the most unhinged (derogatory) storied I have ever read. I read this book out loud to my boyfriend every evening as a Dutch exercise but by God is it tedious. I can’t take it anymore. Olly Richards may be a polyglot, but his stories are genuinely so bad and ridiculous that it made me dread reaching for this book.
I am out and won’t be coming back. Ugh.
I am out and won’t be coming back. Ugh.
September 27, 2023
definitely helped me with my Dutch reading and comprehension skills. but all of the stories were so boring, I am glad it's over
May 29, 2024
Voor mij is dit een belangrijke mijlpaal. Dit is de eerste keer in mijn leven dat ik een boek in een andere taal heb gelezen. Ik ben trots op mezelf. Het niveau van het boek was voor mij perfect. Ik kon qua woorden ongeveer 95% begrijpen. Sommige verhalen waren iets saai maar de meeste waren fijn om te lezen. Echt een aanrader!
December 1, 2025
Makkelijk genoeg om te lezen, maar moelijk genoeg om van te leren! De verhalen zijn noet zo interessant, maar wel goed genoeg!
June 22, 2025
TL;DR I think this book is just part of a money-making scheme ripping off language learners and there are better books/methods to improve your language skills.
Before I start my review, I should point out that I'm not learning Dutch. I am, though, a teacher of both Dutch and English, with pretty much the same qualifications as those Olly Richards brags about. My experience may therefore be very different from people who used to book to learn/improve their Dutch.
So let's move on to the book. One of my students had bought a copy of this book and wanted to talk about it her lessons. So I bought the e-book for myself. The first thing I couldn't fail to notice was that there wasn't a single word of Dutch on the cover. I can understand an English (sub)title but the absence of any Dutch seems a little weird for a book that claims reading is the best way to learn Dutch. Which brings me to my next annoyance. I fully agree that reading is a really important part of learning a language. However, saying it's the best way to learn seems to ignore that language is communication that involve both receptive (reading, listening) and productive (writing, speaking) skills. In general I don't like "methodologies" that claim their way is the only / best way, and this one is no different. What makes it worse in my opinion is that Olly Richards wrote the stories in English and then had them (machine?) translated into other languages. However, some things have been adapted to the different countries, so in the Dutch version Dutch characters all have standard Dutch names (never mind that Dutch society isn’t solely comprised of people with Dutch names) and they find themselves Dutch towns and cities. Nothing else makes these stories Dutch.
I must admit, by the time I started the first story, I was already pretty annoyed by the whole thing, which may have affected my perception of it. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying it is a terrible story. The premise is ridiculous (an English brother and sister, both studying Dutch (why?), who have parents who also happen to speak Dutch quite well (how? why?) and who embark on an exchange year in Amsterdam). There isn’t much of a plot; just a sequence of events with a ridiculous twist. While there are mentions of Dutch people and cities, it’s in no way accurate. Travelling around Amsterdam by bus when trams are far more common. Students taking a taxi from the airport to the city when everybody takes the train. Accidentally ending up on a long-distance bus to Maastricht when the only buses that go that far are international Flixbuses and there’s no way you would mistake those for a city bus. Etc. etc. In other words, the “Dutchness” of the story is very superficial; it’s much more like very generic descriptions that should work for lots of countries.
To be fair, the other stories are slightly better. Does that make them any good? Sadly they’re still pretty awful. Richards claims he’s written stories in different genres but I would disagree. All stories have elements of adventure and mystery with a “twist” at the end. The setting changes (e.g. different countries, different time periods), but to me they all seem to be the same type of stories. Most of them read like fairytales or other short stories for children, since they involve things like knights, Vikings, time-travel watches, invisibility etc. I think only one story is intended as a fairytale since it uses the standard fairytale opening phrase. The standard closing phrase wasn’t used though, which I think is a problem. If you claim to write specific genres, you should at least adhere to the conventions of those genres. Another story is supposed to be spooky, but the twist/resolution makes all a joke of it, which again doesn’t fit the genre. It also ignores the fact the audience of this book is adults, i.e. people who can handle some creepiness. Other stories even lacked a proper ending in my opinion.
Another consequence of using this type of stories is that they don’t involve a lot of everyday, natural communication, i.e. the kind of language that students generally need/want to use/learn. There are some small scenes in the workplace or a restaurant, but they don’t showcase any real communication. In fact, I think these stories could/should use a lot more dialogue than they actually do. And also a lot more show than tell. Again, this book is aimed at adults and they can interpret events; not everything has to be spelled out.
Now that we’re talking about language I should say I didn’t come across any major grammatical issues, but then the structures used are very simple. Of course, the book is aimed at A2-B1 level learners, so the structures shouldn’t be too complex. But at that level, conjunctions and relative clauses are fine. Not in every sentence, obviously, but there can be a good balance between simple and more complex structures. I think that would also improve the reading experience. The grammatical errors I did notice mostly involved uncountable nouns, e.g. we can’t say “twee magische dranken” (we would use “drankjes” instead, or, better in this story, “twee flesjes met magische drank”) or “een struikgewas” (we would say “struikgewas”, even if it’s still an odd word to use).
The real issue is with the vocabulary. The words pretty much all roughly have the meaning they should have, but that doesn’t make it them the right choice. Sometimes a formal word is used when a less formal word would be far more natural (but then someone high in the government is addressed with the informal “jij” rather than the formal “u”). In other cases, it’s just the wrong term for that specific context (e.g. we don’t really use the word “wezen” a lot; we’d probably go straight to “monster” or something similar). All of this just emphasises that these stories aren’t in fact Dutch stories, but English stories translated into Dutch.
As this is a book to help people learn Dutch, difficult / new words are marked and every chapter has a vocabulary list for those words. There’s also a glossary at the end of the book. In the e-book those difficult words are hyperlinks that take you to the glossary at the back rather than the chapter’s vocabulary list. The choice of words, is not always logical. Well, I guess it is logical, if you base it on English. For example, in the sentence “Wees niet bang”, the word “bang” is hyperlinked. The word “wees” isn’t, which makes sense since in English “don’t be” is very basic, but most Dutch learners won’t have encountered this form of the verb “zijn” often so it could also use an explanation.
This book also uses summaries and comprehension check questions at the end of every unit to help readers. While I actually like these features, the comprehension check questions are very detail-oriented. To be fair, I read this book fairly quickly, but I couldn’t always answer the questions without scrolling back. I think it would make more sense to focus on the gist of the story. I think it would also have been good to include some way to allow readers to practise the important vocabulary in the book.
Another issue of this book is poor editing. Some words are printed in bold rather than hyperlinked, some hyperlinked words don’t actually appear in the glossary / vocabulary lists or vice versa. The comprehension check questions also had errors in them (e.g. the wrong name, twice the same answer, no correct answers). I couldn’t find a mention of a Dutch translator or Dutch editor, which makes me think this book was translated by a machine. I don’t want to go into how much I hate that.
After all of these complaints (sorry, I’m Dutch, I can’t help it) I feel I should also point out some of the things that I didn’t hate. As mentioned before, I liked the fact summaries and comprehension check questions are included, and I can say the same for the vocabulary lists and glossary. At the beginning of the book there are some tips for effective reading and how to read the book, and I think those are very useful as well. I also appreciated that the first story (written in the present tense) was clearly easier to read than the others (written in the past tense).
Looking back at what I’ve written so far, I see about 9 paragraphs with critique and only one with positives, so I think it’s clear why I’ve given the book such a low rating. My overall feeling is that this series of books is just an easy way for the author (and the publisher) to make money. There are much better books that have actually been written in Dutch that you can use to boost your learning, e.g. Nieuw in Rotterdam by Max Koedood.
Before I start my review, I should point out that I'm not learning Dutch. I am, though, a teacher of both Dutch and English, with pretty much the same qualifications as those Olly Richards brags about. My experience may therefore be very different from people who used to book to learn/improve their Dutch.
So let's move on to the book. One of my students had bought a copy of this book and wanted to talk about it her lessons. So I bought the e-book for myself. The first thing I couldn't fail to notice was that there wasn't a single word of Dutch on the cover. I can understand an English (sub)title but the absence of any Dutch seems a little weird for a book that claims reading is the best way to learn Dutch. Which brings me to my next annoyance. I fully agree that reading is a really important part of learning a language. However, saying it's the best way to learn seems to ignore that language is communication that involve both receptive (reading, listening) and productive (writing, speaking) skills. In general I don't like "methodologies" that claim their way is the only / best way, and this one is no different. What makes it worse in my opinion is that Olly Richards wrote the stories in English and then had them (machine?) translated into other languages. However, some things have been adapted to the different countries, so in the Dutch version Dutch characters all have standard Dutch names (never mind that Dutch society isn’t solely comprised of people with Dutch names) and they find themselves Dutch towns and cities. Nothing else makes these stories Dutch.
I must admit, by the time I started the first story, I was already pretty annoyed by the whole thing, which may have affected my perception of it. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying it is a terrible story. The premise is ridiculous (an English brother and sister, both studying Dutch (why?), who have parents who also happen to speak Dutch quite well (how? why?) and who embark on an exchange year in Amsterdam). There isn’t much of a plot; just a sequence of events with a ridiculous twist. While there are mentions of Dutch people and cities, it’s in no way accurate. Travelling around Amsterdam by bus when trams are far more common. Students taking a taxi from the airport to the city when everybody takes the train. Accidentally ending up on a long-distance bus to Maastricht when the only buses that go that far are international Flixbuses and there’s no way you would mistake those for a city bus. Etc. etc. In other words, the “Dutchness” of the story is very superficial; it’s much more like very generic descriptions that should work for lots of countries.
To be fair, the other stories are slightly better. Does that make them any good? Sadly they’re still pretty awful. Richards claims he’s written stories in different genres but I would disagree. All stories have elements of adventure and mystery with a “twist” at the end. The setting changes (e.g. different countries, different time periods), but to me they all seem to be the same type of stories. Most of them read like fairytales or other short stories for children, since they involve things like knights, Vikings, time-travel watches, invisibility etc. I think only one story is intended as a fairytale since it uses the standard fairytale opening phrase. The standard closing phrase wasn’t used though, which I think is a problem. If you claim to write specific genres, you should at least adhere to the conventions of those genres. Another story is supposed to be spooky, but the twist/resolution makes all a joke of it, which again doesn’t fit the genre. It also ignores the fact the audience of this book is adults, i.e. people who can handle some creepiness. Other stories even lacked a proper ending in my opinion.
Another consequence of using this type of stories is that they don’t involve a lot of everyday, natural communication, i.e. the kind of language that students generally need/want to use/learn. There are some small scenes in the workplace or a restaurant, but they don’t showcase any real communication. In fact, I think these stories could/should use a lot more dialogue than they actually do. And also a lot more show than tell. Again, this book is aimed at adults and they can interpret events; not everything has to be spelled out.
Now that we’re talking about language I should say I didn’t come across any major grammatical issues, but then the structures used are very simple. Of course, the book is aimed at A2-B1 level learners, so the structures shouldn’t be too complex. But at that level, conjunctions and relative clauses are fine. Not in every sentence, obviously, but there can be a good balance between simple and more complex structures. I think that would also improve the reading experience. The grammatical errors I did notice mostly involved uncountable nouns, e.g. we can’t say “twee magische dranken” (we would use “drankjes” instead, or, better in this story, “twee flesjes met magische drank”) or “een struikgewas” (we would say “struikgewas”, even if it’s still an odd word to use).
The real issue is with the vocabulary. The words pretty much all roughly have the meaning they should have, but that doesn’t make it them the right choice. Sometimes a formal word is used when a less formal word would be far more natural (but then someone high in the government is addressed with the informal “jij” rather than the formal “u”). In other cases, it’s just the wrong term for that specific context (e.g. we don’t really use the word “wezen” a lot; we’d probably go straight to “monster” or something similar). All of this just emphasises that these stories aren’t in fact Dutch stories, but English stories translated into Dutch.
As this is a book to help people learn Dutch, difficult / new words are marked and every chapter has a vocabulary list for those words. There’s also a glossary at the end of the book. In the e-book those difficult words are hyperlinks that take you to the glossary at the back rather than the chapter’s vocabulary list. The choice of words, is not always logical. Well, I guess it is logical, if you base it on English. For example, in the sentence “Wees niet bang”, the word “bang” is hyperlinked. The word “wees” isn’t, which makes sense since in English “don’t be” is very basic, but most Dutch learners won’t have encountered this form of the verb “zijn” often so it could also use an explanation.
This book also uses summaries and comprehension check questions at the end of every unit to help readers. While I actually like these features, the comprehension check questions are very detail-oriented. To be fair, I read this book fairly quickly, but I couldn’t always answer the questions without scrolling back. I think it would make more sense to focus on the gist of the story. I think it would also have been good to include some way to allow readers to practise the important vocabulary in the book.
Another issue of this book is poor editing. Some words are printed in bold rather than hyperlinked, some hyperlinked words don’t actually appear in the glossary / vocabulary lists or vice versa. The comprehension check questions also had errors in them (e.g. the wrong name, twice the same answer, no correct answers). I couldn’t find a mention of a Dutch translator or Dutch editor, which makes me think this book was translated by a machine. I don’t want to go into how much I hate that.
After all of these complaints (sorry, I’m Dutch, I can’t help it) I feel I should also point out some of the things that I didn’t hate. As mentioned before, I liked the fact summaries and comprehension check questions are included, and I can say the same for the vocabulary lists and glossary. At the beginning of the book there are some tips for effective reading and how to read the book, and I think those are very useful as well. I also appreciated that the first story (written in the present tense) was clearly easier to read than the others (written in the past tense).
Looking back at what I’ve written so far, I see about 9 paragraphs with critique and only one with positives, so I think it’s clear why I’ve given the book such a low rating. My overall feeling is that this series of books is just an easy way for the author (and the publisher) to make money. There are much better books that have actually been written in Dutch that you can use to boost your learning, e.g. Nieuw in Rotterdam by Max Koedood.
December 29, 2022
I found the stories boring and it says a2-b1 but if you're more close to the b1 level you will not learn much and find it annoying to read. I think it must be a great ressource book for beginners but the level of reading is not well indicated enough. Evaluation is only according my personal experience with the book!
May 1, 2020
Strange stories in Dutch
The book offers rather a set of weird stories in Dutch for beginners. A sequence of events described in each with meaningless dialogues and no particular plot.
The book offers rather a set of weird stories in Dutch for beginners. A sequence of events described in each with meaningless dialogues and no particular plot.
July 15, 2024
good for learning
Vocab, listening and grammar is great for starting. The only problem is that many of the short stories are rather boring, but they are short stories for language learning, so it’s expected.
Vocab, listening and grammar is great for starting. The only problem is that many of the short stories are rather boring, but they are short stories for language learning, so it’s expected.
August 21, 2024
This book is absolutely awful. I'm not exactly the target audience for it because I'm not a beginner, but I picked this book up just to have some Dutch that I could read faster. However, my better command of Dutch means that I noticed tons of problematic things about this book. I don't even know where to begin, so I'll divide my review into three sections:
Content: The stories themselves are poorly written. I couldn't continue after how utterly ridiculous the second story was. It's almost impressive how the stories are simultaneously very unexpected/unbelievable and also extremely boring.
Language: I can't find any information about who wrote the Dutch version, which makes me think it is Olly Richards, the creator of the "Short Stories in [Language] for Beginners" series. This is a red flag -- why did he rely on his own Dutch skills instead of hiring a professional? Did he also personally write the other 19 books in the series? No one has a advanced enough command of 20 languages to write good learning materials in them all. The Dutch is not grammatically wrong per se, but there are very odd constructions throughout that did not accord with my experience of reading Dutch written by native speakers or professional translators (e.g., over-reliance on a small handful of idioms, which is a hallmark of intermediate L2 learners).
Editing: The book has 3 features meant to assist learners, and two of them are awful and clearly connected to poor planning/editing. First, there are bolded words throughout each chapter which are defined in English at the end of each chapter. This has been done very sloppily -- some words are not defined until the reader has encountered them several times, which points to poor proofreading. The words that are chosen for definitions are also a little odd -- some extremely common words are defined, while very uncommon words are not. This makes me think that the author decided on the same English words to define across the entire series, regardless of how common/uncommon the word was in each language. Second, there is a small comprehension quiz at the end of each chapter. Generally these are okay, but the final chapter of the second story has completely nonsensical questions (the character goes to a lot of locations and there was a question like "What did she do when she went to location X?" and there will be no correct answers, but a correct answer for if the question was about location Y). Again, sloppy editing.
Not worth the paper it's printed on. Luckily I got my copy from the library so I didn't pay for it. It's unfortunate because Dutch graded readers don't really exist and if these stories were good it would be a valuable addition to learning materials.
Content: The stories themselves are poorly written. I couldn't continue after how utterly ridiculous the second story was. It's almost impressive how the stories are simultaneously very unexpected/unbelievable and also extremely boring.
Language: I can't find any information about who wrote the Dutch version, which makes me think it is Olly Richards, the creator of the "Short Stories in [Language] for Beginners" series. This is a red flag -- why did he rely on his own Dutch skills instead of hiring a professional? Did he also personally write the other 19 books in the series? No one has a advanced enough command of 20 languages to write good learning materials in them all. The Dutch is not grammatically wrong per se, but there are very odd constructions throughout that did not accord with my experience of reading Dutch written by native speakers or professional translators (e.g., over-reliance on a small handful of idioms, which is a hallmark of intermediate L2 learners).
Editing: The book has 3 features meant to assist learners, and two of them are awful and clearly connected to poor planning/editing. First, there are bolded words throughout each chapter which are defined in English at the end of each chapter. This has been done very sloppily -- some words are not defined until the reader has encountered them several times, which points to poor proofreading. The words that are chosen for definitions are also a little odd -- some extremely common words are defined, while very uncommon words are not. This makes me think that the author decided on the same English words to define across the entire series, regardless of how common/uncommon the word was in each language. Second, there is a small comprehension quiz at the end of each chapter. Generally these are okay, but the final chapter of the second story has completely nonsensical questions (the character goes to a lot of locations and there was a question like "What did she do when she went to location X?" and there will be no correct answers, but a correct answer for if the question was about location Y). Again, sloppy editing.
Not worth the paper it's printed on. Luckily I got my copy from the library so I didn't pay for it. It's unfortunate because Dutch graded readers don't really exist and if these stories were good it would be a valuable addition to learning materials.
August 21, 2023
This book lacks many important features that graded readers should have.
First, "beginners" is not a really precise indication for the general level of difficulty of the book. The author could have indicated the vocabulary size that learners should have to be able to tackle this book.
Second, I find it really odd that the stories are the same in all the languages from this book collection. This means that the stories are not written in order to tackle specific grammar points or syntactic constructions. The text is just "simplified", but graded readers should also teach. They should introduce grammar by providing enough repetitions of grammar points relevant for the target language at hand. Generally, the fact that the same stories are translated in all languages prevent each book from being really relevant to the target language of the book.
Third, newly introduced words are not repeated enough in each story to be efficiently learnt. Introducing a new word once and putting it in bold is simply not enough for memorization. It should appear several times, first in similar and then in diverse contexts. I also find the choice of words to be put in bold and to have an English translation a bit random, some words which I find more complex than others were not highlighted and did not have a translation.
Honestly, I find this book extremely disappointing, and I even feel a bit scammed. It doesn't look like the author put a lot of thoughts or effort into the book at all. I don't care whether the stories are interesting or not, but I do care about how much they teach me, and the authors made no effort there. This book collection is actually a cash grab, which is a true shame.
First, "beginners" is not a really precise indication for the general level of difficulty of the book. The author could have indicated the vocabulary size that learners should have to be able to tackle this book.
Second, I find it really odd that the stories are the same in all the languages from this book collection. This means that the stories are not written in order to tackle specific grammar points or syntactic constructions. The text is just "simplified", but graded readers should also teach. They should introduce grammar by providing enough repetitions of grammar points relevant for the target language at hand. Generally, the fact that the same stories are translated in all languages prevent each book from being really relevant to the target language of the book.
Third, newly introduced words are not repeated enough in each story to be efficiently learnt. Introducing a new word once and putting it in bold is simply not enough for memorization. It should appear several times, first in similar and then in diverse contexts. I also find the choice of words to be put in bold and to have an English translation a bit random, some words which I find more complex than others were not highlighted and did not have a translation.
Honestly, I find this book extremely disappointing, and I even feel a bit scammed. It doesn't look like the author put a lot of thoughts or effort into the book at all. I don't care whether the stories are interesting or not, but I do care about how much they teach me, and the authors made no effort there. This book collection is actually a cash grab, which is a true shame.
October 26, 2025
I don't mind nonsensical sentences on Duolingo, they force you to pay attention to the grammar and meaning, contrary to common sense sentences that you can easily understand even when not understanding every part of them. But one thing is one sentence in a series of exercises and another is a full story, and trust me, most of these stories are nonsensical, very little coherence, consequence or plausability, which makes them often an annoying read. It doesn't help that this is part of a collection of books translated into several languages and not something written specifically for Dutch learners. In any case it was worth the exercise, I do believe that reading is one of the best ways to improve one's languages skills and I'm glad I could read this one with relative ease.
October 15, 2025
I listened to this in podcast format to work on my Dutch listening comprehension. It was pretty entertaining and a good way to improve comprehension.
I found it much more enjoyable than your standard language learning course. I actually looked forward to listening to a bit more each day, and although I didn’t fully understand each story, I definitely found I was picking up more and more vocabulary and pronunciation as I went along.
It’s not the most groundbreaking literature, but the stories are wacky and fun, and I’ll definitely be looking for similar books to continue learning.
I found it much more enjoyable than your standard language learning course. I actually looked forward to listening to a bit more each day, and although I didn’t fully understand each story, I definitely found I was picking up more and more vocabulary and pronunciation as I went along.
It’s not the most groundbreaking literature, but the stories are wacky and fun, and I’ll definitely be looking for similar books to continue learning.
February 6, 2023
Recueil de nouvelles efficace pour pratiquer et améliorer sa compréhension écrite et son vocabulaire en néerlandais. Le découpage en chapitres courts, le résumé, la liste de vocabulaire et le mini quiz à la fin de chaque chapitre sont pratiques et permettent d'avancer pas à pas.
MAIS dommage que les histoires ne soient pas folles et les dialogues simplets. Mais bon je suppose que c'est le prix à payer pour lire sans difficulté quand on a un niveau A2-B1.
MAIS dommage que les histoires ne soient pas folles et les dialogues simplets. Mais bon je suppose que c'est le prix à payer pour lire sans difficulté quand on a un niveau A2-B1.
August 12, 2022
It was my first whole book read in Dutch, so it plays a very important role in my journey to be fluent reader in the language! Simple stories which are interesting enough for the learning level amid, although it's suitable for who is already around A2 level, a totally beginner might struggle a lot and loose the enjoyment.
August 24, 2023
I’ve been learning Dutch on Duolingo for the past year and a half or so. It was very satisfying to be able to read through these short stories. Not necessarily gripping content, but it’s a good way to get a grasp on the syntax. The vocabulary list and comprehension questions at the end of each chapter were useful.
May 23, 2024
This is brilliant, I have read the book and listened to to the audio version and each time I pick up more Dutch. The stories are fun and surprising though I do struggle to concentrate a little sometimes they are mostly entertaining. I like how the stories progress from really easy to a little more challenging but still readable.
May 3, 2025
I am very thankful for the opportunity to read this collection of stories. I learned a great deal of new vocabulary while doing what I love, reading! Thank you for taking the time to write these stories for us!!! I have recommended them to other friends also learning Dutch. The book was sooooo helpful!!!
December 9, 2025
Overall its quite fine. Not all the stories are super interesting, primarily because they are short and it’s hard to attach or empathize with characters. But, a couple of stories I really liked and it was genuinly interesting to read. Combining it with the fact that I actually understood the whole book - priceless, I had no idea I could understand so much in Dutch.
May 19, 2025
Stories are very boring and uninspiring, but the book is great for learning new vocab and getting used to reading in Dutch. I feel prepared for something more substantial after having read this one. Recommend if you wanna start reading Dutch but wanna get a 'trial version' before :)
May 31, 2022
I recommend this book. The stories are good.
September 23, 2022
The stories are semi-interestinf but the digital formating doesn't work so well
October 14, 2023
The level is appropriate to A2-B1 and the exercises are too. The stories are painfully bad.
January 18, 2025
väga kahtlased lood aga sai uut sõnavara
January 23, 2025
A collection of stories - some amusing and other boring - meant for beginner level Dutch readers. It was one of my first long format reads in Dutch.
January 21, 2022
A good book if you're a level A1-2 Dutch learner. The stories are interesting enough to ease off the effort of reading a text slowly and in a new language. However, you shouldn't expect to read super cool or high-quality literature since the stories are designed for beginners and the writing is intended to be simple enough for them.
August 30, 2024
It really worked! Much better return on investment (time...) than plodding through yet more Duolingo modules. The method is - read short chapter once, at normal speed (I underline unknown words as I go) - check the vocab list at the end, repeat the chapter (lots of missing words click into place) - and then do the test.
Recommended!
Recommended!
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