Intermediate Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook

This book is the successor to Basic Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook. I had gotten through only page 51 of Intermediate Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook when my Dutch unit ended, but I was enjoying it reasonably well and would have liked to continue.

It was teaching me things like, Erik liep met een dampende kop koffie van Starbucks naar zijn geparkeerde auto. (“With a steaming cup of coffee from Starbucks, Erik walked to his parked car.”)

Intermediate Dutch is not, however, 100 percent designed for the self-taught student. I say that because of things like Exercise 4.5, which was a speaking exercise. The instructions were as follows: “Take three different famous talkshows and compare the hosts, the music, the topics, the entertainment value, etc.”

Sitting alone at a coffee shop (which happened to be full of Hebrew speakers, not Dutch speakers), I wrote in the margin, “Oh, brother.” 

Book publishers should, in my opinion, leave the creation of such open-ended exercises up to the whims of teachers of university or other courses. In a book that is ostensibly for both the classroom and the self-taught student, please give me exercises I can check myself.

Nonetheless, what I did get through in Intermediate Dutch was fun, and I wish I had been able to finish it. Maybe in the future!