Last week was punctuated (at least in terms of language) with a package from Lawyer&Mom! She sent me three books with a German base for studying Dutch. Kontrastsprache Niederländisch, Niederländisch Wort für Wort, and Oh dieses Niederländisch. I had actually thumbed through the first one in Berlin at some point - it looks like an interesting book. The first third focuses on what they're calling receptive competence, the second third on active competence, and the final section is on translation competence. What's interesting here is that according to the introduction it appears that by receptive they mean reading (as opposed to listening), active competence means having a good understanding of the morphology and syntax of Dutch and being able to read dialogues, and translation competence means the ability to read more complex texts.
Thumbing through the sections here's what I'm gleaning:
Section 1 - an fairly thorough introduction to Dutch grammar, strong preference on comparing Dutch and German (and to a lesser extent English), and an introduction to Dutch and Belgian culture (with Dutch culture being more prominent). The grammar covered are articles, gender, diminutives, case (hah), pronouns of all types, verbs in quite a lot of detail (including using the passive),
pronominal adverbs, adjectives, adverbs, conditional sentences, and subjunctive. You also learn numbers and how to compare things.
Section 2 - dialogues and longer texts. Each chapter begins with an introduction text or dialogue which is then followed later in the chapter with a much lengthier dialogue or text. Save for the first chapter in this section, these are all pretty lengthy. It's not your average language textbook dialogue. There also appears to be a much stronger emphasis on vocabulary than the first section. Most of the exercises involve being able to put the correct word (noun, adj, or adv) into a text which is either a summary or a dialogue.
Section 3 - These are all longer texts and most are news stories (or sections of them) from 2001. There are some reading comprehension exercises and they pick out thematic vocabulary, but mostly this is just a wall of articles.
What is true of all of the sections is that the vast majority of the text is in Dutch. The grammar explanations are all in German, but otherwise it's mainly Dutch. By chapter 2 it has you reading page long explanations in Dutch without any translation. There's also almost no audio. Speaking is seriously not emphasized (which makes the inclusion of dialogues very odd to me). There are mp3s on the publisher's website for each of the longer texts in the first section but, remember, these are not dialogues.
All and all this seems like it'll be a really interesting book especially given my background in linguistics and German. I know a number of people who I suspect would find this book really interesting.
