We made this list of the thousand most common Dutch words by doing a statistical analysis of a large collection of Dutch-language articles.
Dutch is a Germanic language, and so is English. That’s why quite a few Dutch words are similar to English, for example: “boek” (book), “woord” (word), and “vriend” (friend).
Similar words like those are one of the reasons why Dutch isn’t too hard to learn when you already know English.
When you think of the Netherlands, you might picture tulips and windmills. But those words —“tulp” (tulip) and “windmolen” (windmill)— didn’t appear often enough in the texts that we analyzed to make it onto this list.
Neither did the word for “cheese” (“kaas” in Dutch).
Still, this list is full of useful Dutch words, like “mooi” (pretty), “fiets” (bicycle), and “vis” (fish).
Clearly, you’ll need to learn more than a thousand words to speak fluent Dutch. But this vocabulary list should get you started learning Dutch.