Learn Afrikaans phrases and sentences

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Learn Afrikaans phrases and sentences by selecting the phrases that you want to learn from the list.

These cover a wide variety of Afrikaans topics, including the numbers in Afrikaans, Afrikaans days, Afrikaans greetings and the months in Afrikaans all with audio.

Afrikaans phrases

A few first words. 1, A few first words. 2, A few first words. 3 Bathroom. Items found in the bathroom, Bedroom. Items found in the bedroom, Buying things. General phrases, Buyings things. Useful words, Communication problems, Conversation. Introductions, Conversation. Small talk. 1, Conversation. Small talk. 2, Conversation. Filler words, Conversation. Small talk. Sport, Conversation. Small talk. The weather, Countries, Days. General, Days of the week, Describing things. Adjectives, Describing things. Colours, Directions. 1, Directions. 2, Eating items, Eating phrases. 1, Eating phrases. 2, Emergencies, Family, Food and drink. General phrases, Food and drink. At the bar or caf. 1, Food and drink. At the bar or caf. 2, Food and drink. At the bar or caf. 3, General phrases, Getting around. General phrases, Getting around. Train and bus, Getting around by taxi, Getting around by car, Health, Household items, Money, Months of the year, Numbers. 1 to 10, Numbers. 11 to 20, Numbers. 30 to 1000, Parts of the body, Places and buildings. 1, Places and buildings. 2, Question and size words, Some animals, Somewhere to stay. 1, Somewhere to stay. 2, Time, The house, Useful words to recognize, Words to do with food. General, Words to do with food. Fruit, Words to do with food. Meat. Words to do with food. Vegetables.

Afrikaans sentences

Learn Afrikaans through sentences. Five hundred useful Afrikaans sentences designed to give you a good basic conversational vocabulary.

Afrikaans grammar

These sentences illustrate some Afrikaans grammatical points.

Adjectives, Modal verbs, Negation 1, Negation 2, Negation 3, Past tense, Word order.

Questions

Questions. 1, Questions. 2, Questions. 3.

Verbs

Future tense 1, Future tense 2.

Afrikaans language learning games

As well as the flashcards for the Afrikaans phrases there are additional learning games for colours, days, fruit, months, numbers and vegetables.

Test whether you know the difference between a wortel, aartappel, suurlemoen and waatlemoen, can count from een to tien and know groen from blou.

Colours Fruit Months Numbers. 1 to 10 Numbers. 1 to 20 Vegetables

Afrikaans crossword Practice and improve your basic vocabulary by doing Afrikaans crosswords, or try a wordsearch. Afrikaans

There are approximately sixteen million speakers of Afrikaans. The vast majority of whom live in South Afrika and Namibia. Nowadays it is also common to hear it spoken in cities such as London due to the large amount of emigration.

Afrikaans When Jan van Riebeck arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to establish a trading settlement for the Dutch East India Company the language he spoke was a Netherlands' dialect from South Holland.

This dialect over time became modern Afrikaans. Afrikaans therefore has its origins in Dutch and belongs to the Germanic group of Indi-European languages. It also contains many loan words from Portuguese, Malay and African languages.

English also has various loan words taken from Afrikaans.

Some examples are: apartheid 'separateness', aardvark 'earth pig', meerkat 'lake cat', springbok 'jumping antelope' and rooibos 'red bush'. See the Wiki entry for further examples.

The variety of Dutch which eventually become Afrikaans developed from the mid sixteen-hundreds and so can be called the youngest language in the world.

There are now many differences from Dutch, one of the most obvious being that there is no longer any gender distinction for nouns. So in Afrikaans 'the man' and 'the woman' are ' die man ' and ' die vrou ' respectively - ' die ' meaning 'the'.

Afrikaans language

Few verbs have distinct tenses: tenses such as future, past and conditional are formed by the modal verbs so 'I/he/we/you/they will make' becomes sal maak, 'have made' het gemaak and 'would make' sou maak, with sal, het and sou invariable for person and number.

Afrikaans resembles English in being a predominately 'analytic' language, meaning that it relies mainly on word order rather than word endings to indicate grammatical relationships. In simple sentences it uses the same subject-predicate system as English does, though it has the Germanic habit of putting the participle or infinitive at the end of the sentence when a compound verb is involved: Ek sien die huis (I see the house) becomes Ek het die huis gesien (I saw the house).

Similarly the verbal element goes to the end of a subordinate clause: Ek het die huis gesien, wat hy gister gekoop het (I saw the house that he bought yesterday) and Ek het die huis gesien wat hy more sal koop (I saw the house that he will buy tomorrow).

Negatives: 'Not' requires a double form: Ek het die huis nie gesien nie (I did not see the house).

Questions are expressed through inversion: Sal ek die huis sien? (Will I see the house?) or by the use of an interrogative such as watter as in Watter huis (Which house?) or Watter is die huis? (Which is the house?).

Gender: There are no grammatical genders in Afrikaans.

Related languages

Dutch, German.

Fluency and beyond

I'm not saying there are not good Afrikaans courses around. But I'm more and more of the opinion that other than a few books (and a dictionary), the best content to learn a language well is probably found outside of traditional channels.

Resources

www.easyafrikaans.com Afrikaans phrases and more.

www.netwerk24.com The news in Afrikaans.

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