The Dutch language can be pretty tricky. Even if Dutch is your native language. How do you proceed if you are not sure which preposition to use in a particular case? What is an advanced way of searching for the correct preposition in a dictionary, on a language site, in a quality newspaper or a preposition dictionary?
What makes it so important to know the correct preposition?
Admittedly, it often makes little or no difference to the understanding of a sentence in a conversation whether a speaker uses the correct prepositions. Still, people tend to listen better to someone who phrases carefully than to other speakers.
In a written text, readers sometimes quickly lose track of small, textual imperfections. Take the application letter, for example. Sometimes you have beautiful diplomas or you have great work experience. You write an application letter under the assumption that you are a good candidate for a particular vacancy. But if you find a personnel officer who sees mistakes against Dutch in your cover letter as proof of inability to comply or even as a form of laziness, you have little chance of getting that job. And that while you would otherwise be perfectly suited for the offered position.
There are even more of those situations. Take, for example, a substantive report that you have drawn up and submitted to the management for approval in the hope that you can further develop or lead a new project. Of course you would like this report to be assessed on its substantive aspects. But you run the risk that the management will become less enthusiastic about your project idea than you hoped for out of (usually unconscious) annoyance about imperfections in your formulations. Remember, busy readers hate having to read a sentence twice because of an unfortunate preposition.
In all these cases, careful use of the Dutch language, including application of the correct prepositions, can help you achieve your intended goal.
Why choosing the right preposition is so difficult these days
Dutch is a complicated language. Doubts about which preposition is appropriate in a particular context occurs not only among people for whom Dutch is their second language, but also among native speakers. This has several causes. For example, in current education you get relatively little lessons in the Dutch language. Moreover, there are many texts on the internet that a professional editors have never looked at.
The more often you see poorly formulated Dutch texts, the more you will have doubts about which preposition is correct in a particular case.
How can you find out which preposition is correct in a particular case? Broadly speaking, there are four possibilities:
consult general dictionaries, authoritative sites on language or a preposition dictionary, or a quality newspaper if necessary.
Consulting a general Dutch dictionary
In the better dictionaries you will find examples of the use of a certain word. With a bit of luck you will find a sentence with the word you are looking for (in this case ‘insight’) in which the corresponding preposition is used in a relevant context. But what do you do if the dictionary doesn’t offer a solution?
If you search the concise free online dictionary VanDale Dutch for ‘insight’, you will only find ‘until gain insight ‘. So you need a more extensive dictionary.
Language professionals like to use the digital or online Van Dale Groot dictionary of the Dutch language. If you look in the current, 14th, busy at the entrance ‘insight’, you will not find any examples with ‘in’ or ‘over’. If you search within the articles for ‘insight into’, you will find hits: no less than twelve! The first of those hits can be found under the entrance aha-erlebnis. In the explanation of that term it says: ‘suddenly emerging insight in a problem when (…). ‘
Then you can also see if the other eleven entrances shed some more light on the matter. To be on the safe side, you also search within the articles for ‘insight about‘, but that does not provide any new inputs.
Search within authoritative language sites
To start, you can consider how major language sites deal with prepositions associated with the words you are looking for.
For example, search the site of:
- onzetaal.nl, for example, in the specific part of Onze Taal’s advice on prepositions.
- taalunieversum.org, for example in the specific part of Taaladviesnet’s advice on prepositions.
Searching Onze Taal’s advice on prepositions does not yield anything this time. That is why you give the search function of that site a try. You search for “insight in” (including the double quotation marks around these two words). Now you will find the seven relevant results: http://onzetaal.nl/informatie/?q=inzicht%20in
In a similar way you now search for “insight about”. That does not produce a single hit. And searching for a variant such as “insights about” also yields nothing. If you are a member of Onze Taal, you can put the question to the editor.
If you are not a member of Onze Taal, or you do not have time to wait, look further in the advice of Taaladviesnet about prepositions. This also does not yield any meaningful hits. However, if you search directly in Google on: “insight in” site: taalunieversum.org, you will find more than 800 hits. To be on the safe side, you also search for “insight about” on site: taalunieversum.org and you will find five hits.
Consulting a preposition dictionary
The best way to know which preposition fits in a particular context is to consult a preposition dictionary. Popular with professional language users Prism Prepositions it has been compiled by dr. Riemer Reinsma and drs. Will JB Hus (publishing house Prisma). Publishers Auctor published an even more extensive version of this book under the title Prepositional pointer, but this book is unfortunately no longer available.
In the book Prism Prepositions you will not only find information about the correct form of prepositional clauses, but you will also learn whether a prepositional clause can be omitted. And in addition, you will learn which types of nouns can be included in the provision.
You will usually find what you are looking for quickly and easily. That is the case again. This dictionary has under ‘insight’ a large number of examples from which you can deduce which preposition is best in a certain context. At the moment your search focuses on when ‘in‘ and when ‘about‘would be the correct preposition.
You discover that insight in the sense of ‘understanding’ is combined with ‘in’ (something). The example reads: “At last he gained insight in the problem’. Also in the sense of ‘understanding’ comes the combination ‘difference of insight about (something) ‘with the explanation that these are different opinions.
Advanced search within quality newspaper sites
What do you do if both your general Dutch dictionary and your prepositional dictionary are silent in all languages? Then you set your hopes for quality newspapers such as NRC and de Volkskrant, which usually pay close attention to the quality of Dutch. The preferences of the professional journalists on that site are easiest to find with advanced googling.
Sometimes you will find the right hits thanks to the search function of the relevant newspaper site itself. But sometimes it is more convenient to use the general Google search engine.
In the latter case, this search often comes down to trying out combinations of one or more words and a preposition. You do this by placing the entire combination in double quotation marks, and possibly placing an asterisk as a wild card between the words. Continue to your search query site: www.nrc.nl or with site: www.volkskrant.nl to add, ask Google to search only within a specific newspaper. Now you have to take into account that mistakes are not always noticed due to pressure on a newsroom.
The fastest solution for finding the correct prepositions
All four of the above strategies can help you find the correct preposition, but the preposition dictionary will in most cases provide you with the information you are looking for the fastest and most extensively.