I’ve heard many times from many Dutch people that their language is the hardest in the world to learn. I have to admit to some scepticism — Polish has a case marking system that has to be seen to be believed, and English speakers can’t even distinguish the sounds used in some languages (the difference between the P in English “sPit” and “Pit” can change the meaning of words, for instance, or look at Mandarin where the way the pitch of your voice changes across a syllable affects the meaning). But I think I’m starting to see what they mean. What Dutch has in abundance is particles and prepositions.

I wanted to say “I’m not always aware of it.” (The ‘it’ in question was playing with my beard, a habit that becomes extremely embarassing when I occasionally shave it off.) The Dutch equivalent is apparently “Ik ben me er niet altijd van bewust,” which glosses word-by-word as “I am me there not always of aware.” This is by my count already two words too long, and if you explicitly say what ‘it’ is you don’t get any saving, unlike English: “I’m not always aware that I’m playing with my beard” versus “Ik ben me er niet altijd van bewust dat ik zit te spelen met mijn baard.”

My Dutch friends thought my confusion was great fun, and decided to exacerbate it by showing me a variant. In Dutch you can push all sorts of things to the front of the sentence, and the word order of the rest changes in strange and wonderful ways. In this case, we end up with “Daar ben ik me niet altijd bewust van,” after which I gave up completely, having almost pulled my beard entirely off my chin.