During this class we mostly did exercises out of the textbook (listening, speaing, and some writing). But there were a few things that stood out in my notes, namely random little phrases or expressions you can say in Dutch.
1. wat mij betreft: personally, for me, as far as I’m concerned. Wat mij betreft, kun jij een iPad kopen. As far as I’m concerned you can buy an iPad. Thanks for the example sentence, Marco!
2. Nee heb je, ja kun je krijgen: Literally – you have no, but you can get yes. Actually: if you don’t do anything (or do the work) you have nothing. If you do something, you might be successful.
3. Het zal mij benieuwen . . . I wonder if . . . Het zal mij benieuwen of hij komt. I wonder if he will come.
4. met je neus op de feiten gedrukt = to get someone’s attention so he can no longer ignore the situation (literally: with your nose pressed up against the facts … !)
I will also give a recommendation for this app if your Dutch is pretty good. I tried to download it last year but my Dutch wasn’t that great then, so I got bored quickly and deleted it. It’s an app that lets you guess what the meaning of various expressions (uitdrukkingen) are. It’s called Spreekwoorden and available for the iPhone/iPad/iTouch. Read more | Download/iTunes link.
It’s not the best app in the world but it’s free. The main “issue” with the app is that you are given an expression and have four choices to choose from. But each of the four choices is a legitimate answer for a saying, even if it is not the right choice for this saying. I assume the other three wrong answers are pulled randomly from the database. Thus sometimes you can easily tell which one is the right answer because the other three don’t make sense. (Of course, you can also be fooled!) And I will admit I found level 1 too easy so I went to level 2 and got a lot of wrong answers. Opps!
Life in the Hague 