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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve-o" data-source="post: 219051">Yeah I read somewhere that Afrikaans is 75% similar to Dutch, think it may be on wikipedia. A lot of small changes like 'ij' instead of 'y', and Dutch tends to have more 'en' at the end of words. So in that sense Afrikaans is a simplified version of Dutch. My second cousin was a nanny in Holland for about 3 years and apparently she says it's harder to go from Afrikaans to Dutch than the other way around. I also heard the dialects in the southern part of the country is the most similar to Afrikaans (less windy, if that makes sense), a region or place called Zeeland being the closest if I remember correctly. I personally can understand Dutch and Flemish much better than German. I only catch like every 5th word in German. Reading any of the Germanic languages is easy compared to listening like you say, all those weird accents and dialects.</blockquote>