Any comprehensive comparison of modal verbs in German and Dutch?

[evandro]

Knowing German is pretty handy when you start studying Dutch, but I've realized that there a many differences on how both languages use modal verbs.

Does anyone who know both languages can recommend any good/comprehensive/accurate comparison of both languages in this topic?

Thanks in advance!

[Klara]

You may have a look here:

https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2604165/view

[Klara]

Apart from modal verbs, modal particles in German and Dutch can be a real issue for language learners. This is my favourite book about Modal particles:

Schwierige Wörtchen leicht übersetzt: Modalpartikeln und sinnverwandte Ausdrücke im Deutschen, Englischen, Niederländischen und Französischen

German has a plethora of modal particles, Dutch has a lot, French has a few and English next to none. This made me thinking, how an English native speaker could grasp the idea of modal particles (in German also: Abtönungspartikel) by using the comprehensible input method only or mainly. And bi-directional translation would also not help that much because those little words sometimes can't even be translated or their actual meaning depends on the intonation of the sentence.

[tastyonions]

Apart from modal verbs, modal particles in German and Dutch can be a real issue for language learners. This is my favourite book about Modal particles:

Schwierige Wörtchen leicht übersetzt: Modalpartikeln und sinnverwandte Ausdrücke im Deutschen, Englischen, Niederländischen und Französischen

German has a plethora of modal particles, Dutch has a lot, French has a few and English next to none. This made me thinking, how an English native speaker could grasp the idea of modal particles (in German also: Abtönungspartikel) by using the comprehensible input method only or mainly. And bi-directional translation would also not help that much because those little words sometimes can't even be translated or their actual meaning depends on the intonation of the sentence.

Thanks for suggesting this. I've just ordered it.

[Iversen]

German has a plethora of modal particles, Dutch has a lot, French has a few and English next to none. This made me thinking, how an English native speaker could grasp the idea of modal particles (in German also: Abtönungspartikel) by using the comprehensible input method only or mainly. And bi-directional translation would also not help that much because those little words sometimes can't even be translated or their actual meaning depends on the intonation of the sentence.

That only leaves pattern recognition, and for once translation (even between German and Dutch) won't help you much. So the solution must be to learn the basic scheleton of each language first - and then find 20-or 40 examples where a given particle is used and just look at them (or listen to them again and again) until you feel in your guts that there actually is something common in those examples - i.e. use comprehensible input, but on a whole bunch of examples, not just on one or two.

And then you may indeed find that there isn't just one simple translation. There may be another way to convey the same 'feeling' (because it's typically some 'feelie' or attitude thing) - maybe through a verb or an emoji - but you probably have to be fairly adept in both languages to find it.

The funny thing is that I don't think the use of modal verbs is as hard to codify as the behaviour of the pesky small grey modal particles (like "er" in Dutch or "halt" in German).

[Klara]

In this paper the modal particles "denn" and "eigentlich" and their French pendants are discussed.

https://bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/download/404/639/1392

According to this image from the article, there are 21 possible translations for "denn" and 16 for "eigentlich":

denn_eigentlich.jpg

[evandro]

Apart from modal verbs, modal particles in German and Dutch can be a real issue for language learners. This is my favourite book about Modal particles:

Indeed, they are! And they are still my number one struggle in German, which is why I still have a long way to go with them. Thank you for all these tips!