Virtually Infinite Resources for Reading in Dutch

Learning a language can be a lot of fun.

Activities considered to be a waste of time are valuable practices when learning a language.

Watching movies, TV programs, and videos are excellent ways to improve your listening skills.

Reading newspapers, magazines, and books are not only fun but also great for improving your vocabulary and grammar.

You can buy hard copy versions of newspapers, magazines, and books. You can also find free, legal articles and books online.

Before diving into free, legal resources online, let's go over some practices to get the most out of your reading time.

Build Vocabulary

To make the most of your reading time, you need to search, save, and study the new words you come across while reading.

Luckily, this is really easy thanks to an array of free online tools.

I published a detailed post about using Google Translate to build your phrasebook. Make sure to go through the steps in that post when you finish this post.

Accelerate Your Learning

When you start learning a language, it's OK to use a dictionary between your language and the target language.

After you build a basic vocabulary, it's highly recommended to use a dictionary in the target language only.

That way you not only repeat the words that you already know, but you also find a lot of grammar and usage information including example sentences in those dictionaries.

Van Dale has multiple free online dictionaries. I recommend using the NL-NL dictionary first. Use the NL-EN version only if you really can't understand the Dutch explanation of a word.

Wiktionary is an excellent, free dictionary. It not only contains the meanings of the words but also extensive grammar knowledge about them.

Short Reads

Google News is a good starting point for short reads. It has separate editions for the Netherlands and Belgium. If you live in Belgium, you can also read VRT Nieuws.

The Dutch version of Wikipedia has some decent articles on its homepage and featured content section.

Free, Legal Books

Following resources have a myriad of ebooks that you can download legally.

These resources contain books in epub, pdf, Kindle, HTML, and plain text formats, which you can read on your computer, smartphone, tablet, or ebook-reader.

Bookboon.com offers free study books in Dutch.
Bol.com free ebooks in epub format.
eReaders.nl a collection of links to free ebooks selected by their editors, updated monthly.
MustReads.nl a collection of links to free ebooks selected by their editors.
Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren
Amazon Kindle free Amazon Kindle books in Dutch.
GratisEpub.nl a collection of links to free ebooks.
Dutch books in Project Gutenberg

You can spend hours every day reading newspapers, magazines, and books in Dutch, and adding new words to your phrasebook. That would be time well-spent, entertaining and worthwhile.

Now, start a phrasebook in Google Translate following the instructions here and dive into the magical world of reading via the links above.

Any questions or comments? Send an email to info@learnpractice.com to contact me directly.

Burak Bilgin,
Founder of Learn Practice

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