To Learn Dutch Online

Q: Iam struggling to learn nederlands on my own. Presently iam reading a book entitled Teach yourself Dutch.sometimes I follow up courses online -Learn Dutch online.I have problems with the past tenses and Het and De words.what can i do to solve this problem?

A:My girlfriend is learning Dutch as well and encounters the same problems with the De and Het words. There is nothing you can do about it then learn as many words as you can by heart. If you're a native speaker of English, there is absolutely no way of guessing. There are just a couple of rules that apply universially. 1 Words ending with -ing are alway 'de' (feminine) 2. Words in the diminuative form (verkleinwoorden) are always 'het' (neutrum) There are probably more general rules, but I'm not really an expert on Dutch grammar. Others might be able to give you more insight. It will certainly help if you familiariaze yourself with grammatical terminology in both English and Dutch. but that will take a lot of hard studying.