{"id":5942,"date":"2019-02-27T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/dutch\/?p=5942"},"modified":"2019-03-04T08:18:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T08:18:11","slug":"words-of-shock-and-surprise-in-dutch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/dutch\/words-of-shock-and-surprise-in-dutch\/","title":{"rendered":"Words of Shock and Surprise in Dutch!"},"content":{"rendered":"

English speakers tend to express shock and surprise with phrases such as Oh my God! or WOW! And while it is perfectly okay to use these in Dutch (because the trend with native Dutch speakers is to add some English words here and there), there are perfectly good words and phrases in Dutch you can use. In this post, I will explore some of these shockingly Dutch options!<\/p>\n

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Photo taken by Michelle Galloway found on Flickr.com with license CC BY 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

Ongelofelijk<\/em><\/h3>\n

If you find something truly hard to believe, you can really just say it like that: ongelofelijk!<\/em> I live in Limburg and there seems to be a bit of a separation between people from Limburg and politicians in The Hague. Because of this, Limburgers are always on alert when someone from “above the river” makes a blunder about the region. Every year, there is at least one article in one of the major Dutch newspapers that puts news from the Dutch Limburg in the buitenland<\/em> section. This year, we have two political parties to thank for starting the year with some good blunders! Political party Forum voor Democratie<\/em> had a big banner at a recent campaign event<\/a> in Limburg with a beautiful church on it…except that this church is actually in the town of\u00a0Limburg an der Lahn…in Germany!\u00a0 The second political party we can thank is DENK. They have also started campaigning in the region and one of their points is\u00a0protecting our beaches from construction<\/a>. This all sounds lovely except for the fact that Limburg has no beach or oceans for that matter.\u00a0Ongelofelijk!\u00a0<\/em>Someone needs to do their homework before publishing campaign material!<\/p>\n

Meen je dat nou?<\/h3>\n

Literally translated, this means do you believe that, and with the right intonation it can certainly apply to many situations of disbelief. There are a few variations of this you can use such as\u00a0dat meen jij niet!\u00a0<\/em>When someone tells you something you can’t believe you can reply\u00a0meen je dat nou?\u00a0<\/em>to stress that you can’t believe it. The Dutch telecommunications company Ziggo used this phrase and a few others to stress how surprisingly low their rates are.<\/p>\n