Postby Iversen » Thu Jul 14, 2022 7:07 pm
If the question is which one you should study first, then I would definitely go for Dutch. It is spoken by more people than Afrikaans (25 mio in the Netherlands, Vlanderen, Suriname and a couple of places more), and it's the dominating language there which means that you have a much wider range of native materials to choose from. In South Africa (and to some degree Namibia) there are lots of Afrikaans speakers (allegedly 7 mio+), but because everyone in those countries automatically speaks English to foreigners you may have some trouble finding them. OK, in the Netherlands people also assume that foreigners only know English or French or German, but people who live there generally do speak Dutch, and you just have to find ways to lure them into using that language with you. On the other hand some people in ZA have bad vibes about Afrikaans because of apartheid, so you may have the same feeling trying out your Afrikaans as a person speaking Dutch in Namur or Liège (Dutch in Wallonia, well I have not dared try it... . and luckily I know I bit of French).
On a more practical level: I visited several bookstores i ZA during my latest visit, and there were lots of books and magazines in Afrikaans about nature and trekking and (not least) religion, but there is a much wider gamut of topics available for Anglophones - probably also more original fiction. In contrast every bookstore in the Netherlands or Vlanderen has materials about just about anything you can dream up (I'm not sure about Suriname - I have only been to one bookstore in Paramaribo, but I don't remember the proportions of books in different languages there).
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