Knee Duh Land Duh

:: Borrowed from macobra historic ::

Sometimes my pronunciation of certain German words just don't roll off my tongue as easy as i wish they would. But i guess that comes down to practice. One particular word that i keep messing up is the country that i'm from. The Netherlands. It's a bit embarrassing that i can't pronounce my own country of citizenship.

For non-German speakers i'll try my best to break it down to how i think it sounds like if you'd use the English language. For German speakers, well, don't laugh.

So here it goes, in English it's the Netherlands.

In German it's die Niederlande.

Now for god knows how long i've always pronounced it "Neh-duh-land" - without stretching the "a" in land and sounding nasal like an American [no offense to Americans] but more like i was trying to speak the Queen's English with an accent.

But my pronunciation was totally off. Maybe because that's how i think the Dutch say it: Nederland. Again, i could be wrong there too.

So yea, many thanks to dict.cc - my trusty online English-German dictionary for their fancy button which enables people to hear the pronunciation of words.

And i got it! My sure way of remembering...

Knee [like when i fell off my bike and i bruised my KNEE]
Duh [like, DUH you should know how to say this by now]
Land [like where did you LAND? *Spoken in a Queen's English accent*]
Duh [like DUH, see KNEE example]

Now stitch it together and it's Knee-duh-lan-duh.

So when anyone asks me where i'm from, i can say:

Auf deutsch:
Ich komme aus den Niederlande.

Sounds a bit like:
Ish com-muh ow-ss den Knee-duhlan-duh.