[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by Vman455

You use all them thar J's and E's in weird places, right? Like "Nijmegen" and "van Doeselaar"?

My knowledge of Dutch encompasses only place names and organ-related nomenclature. Fortunately, whenever I go there, it turns out everyone speaks English.

We don't voice over movies, we use subtitles and have the original sound. So just by watching TV most people over here get a daily dose of English

On double Dutch vowels:
Dutch has lots of compound vowels cause it expresses all the different sounds more consitently than English does (where words that sound the same can be written quite differently, and vice versa).
And we have several sounds the English language does not have.
Double vowels (aa, ee, oo, uu) sound different than single ones, and certain combinations (au, ei, eu, ie, ij, oe, ou, ui) stand for yet other single unique sounds.

There are self-study language sites that can voice words in the language you study, so you can hear how they sound.
Have fun with the Dutch compound vowels EU, UI and IJ, and while you're at it the letter G. Unless you speak Spanish, as the G sounds the same as the Spanish J...
I live in Nieuwegein (Neewah{spanish J}eyn, you won't get the last bit right).

Officially the ij is a single letter in Dutch, it used to replace the y but now is the 27th letter in our alphabet.
In practice keyboards that have the ij as a separate letter are rare even here; texts containing the ij char cause conversion problems so I think it won't last.