When you bought the course, you should have immediate access… well at least after some minutes. Of course, why would I want you to wait to start the course?

But what if it’s not listed in the student profile?

1. Check: are you looking at the right place?
   The ‘online courses’ dropdown menu on the top leads to the sales page. If you purchased the course, you’ll find it in your student profile.
2. Check: purchase date
   When did you buy the course? You always buy access for 1 year. Access is not automatically extended, so if you want to continue to use it after the year, you buy a new 1 year license.
3. Check: if you’re logged in with the right account
   Did you buy it less than 1 year ago, and you don’t see the course listed? Please, make sure that you are logged in with the account (e-mail address) that you used to purchase the course. Most people who report this issue have created more than 1 account over time and are simply logged in with the other account. First logout here: https://learndutch.org/logout/ and then login with the other e-mail (First time? Use the password reset function!)
4. Next:
   Are you sure you are logged in with the right account and you purchased access less than a year ago? Then, please send an e-mail to bart@learndutch.org with a printscreen of the student profile (make sure your name is visible) and the date when you pruchased the course.

You can’t load the website? The videos are not playing?

First thing to do: please check if the problem is on your end.

Try to login on a different browser, or on a different device or different network connection to see if you have the same problem.

If it’s working on one device, but it does on the other… then the problem is likely on your end. I can’t help solving it, but I can give you some suggestions:
– the could be a ‘cookie’ conflict, try to clear the cookies in the browser
– privacy settings: try to reduce the privacy level – certain privacy settings might prevent you from seeing the content, for example our video player will need to understand on which url the video is embedded, otherwise the video won’t show
– do you have plugins / extensions installed in your browser (for example adblockers); if those extensions/plugins block scripts that are running on our website, you might not be able to see the content
– are you using the latest version of browser / operating system; sometimes the bug is there; for example iOS released one update a few years ago that prevented the vimeo player from working, it was fixed in the next update, but if you’re running that version, you might still have issues
– after multiple failed login attempts, your IP-address might be blocked – if this is the matter you can’t see the website at all, unless you change connection; blocks are automatically lifted after 24 hours
– if you can’t play the videos: check if your internet connection is fast enough to streem videos
– if you can’t play the videos in certain countries: on my website I embed videos that are hosted on Youtube and Vimeo. You might want to check if Youtube and Vimeo are blocked in your country. Then you will only be able to see the videos if you use VPN. If you purchased #dutchgrammar, and you find out that Vimeo is blocked in your country and you don’t have VPN, just send me an e-mail to ask for a refund.

If you have the same issue on multiple devices, browsers and internet connection… then most likely the issue is on our end.

– if the website is down (it sometimes happens when there is a ddos-attack on the server), it usually takes the provider up to an hour to fix it; I would recommend to wait for an hour and see if the problem is still there, then send an e-mail. If the website is down, usually my mailbox floods instantly with reports! So, I know about this usually within minutes after it happens and the hosting provider will start working on it immediately.
– any other issue that you see on different devices (with a good internet connection) please send a printscreen to bart@learndutch.org

When you reset your password, the website will send an e-mail. You click the link in the e-mail and input a new password.

What if you didn’t get the e-mail?
There are two possible issues.
Issue 1: it’s in your spam folder or promotions folder (gmail), my website sends e-mails automatically, it is very well possible that providers as gmail/hotmal mark this as ‘spam’ or ‘promotions/advertising’. I would strongly recommend (1) to check these folders and (2) to make sure my e-mail address is whitelisted and goes to the main folder next time
Issue 2: you made a typo when registering on the website and/or buying a course. So the password reset e-mail will not arrive to you. If this is the matter, you need my help, write me an e-mail on bart@learndutch.org

What if the reset link doesn’t work?
Send me an e-mail with a printscreen. (This was a bug in a previous version of the software we’re using to build the website. It should be resolved now.)

I kindly ask you to check first the most frequently asked questions in this section.

If your issue is not listed here, then please be as specific as possible about the issue that you want to report. I can help you if I understand the issue… General remarks like ‘it’s not working’ make it very difficult for me to address the issue!

Preferably:
– make a printscreen that highlights the error / bug or what confuses you, describe the problem specifically and send it by mail to bart@learndutch.org

I did my best to have no errors in the content at all. But typos can happen, and I might may narrate something different than the text in front of me. Even though there a multiple people involved in checking the content, it can happen that we oversea a mistake.

#dutchgrammar
If you bought #dutchgrammar, you will see a ‘report error/bug’ button. I kindly ask you to use this function if you see a mistake in our materials.

Please report only, if you are 100% sure that it is an error/bug. Please read the question well… yes, sometimes the question can be: ‘which word is NOT correct’.

Other materials
I plan to make a report error button for the other materials as well (‘1000 words’ / ‘Heb je zin?’). Until that is realised, preferably send a printscreen of the error to bart@learndutch.org. Please make clear which course, lesson, number, question number etc.

When will the error be corrected?
Will the error be corrected the next day? No. Correcting an error requires attention. One error might repeat itself in different sections of the course, and everything should be checked. Some errors take a lot of time to correct. So, what I do is that I gather all reported errors and then process them in batches once every half year.

Community
Reporting errors/bugs is very much appreciated. It’s not just me making the content. It’s a community as well. Your feedback helps other learners. I know, I should send you ‘dankjewel’ messages for every reported error. It should be part of my system, which I haven’t realised yet. Just want you to know that we’re all very thankful to people who make this course better.

The ‘checkbox’ in front of a course, listed in your student profile, is checked ‘green’ if you completed every element of the course. Passing the exam is only one element.

In order to get the course marked as ‘complete’, make sure that you:
– passed every exercise of the course
– marked every element complete (so please push the ‘mark complete’ button at every handout/vocabulary section)
– passed the exam

Once you did that, the checkbox will be checked and green in front of the course in the student profile.

Important remark:
– I might add extra exercises in the future, if I think that will make the course better. As a result the checkbox might disappear. I hope that you will value a possible future step of adding extra exercises, instead of being disappointed that ‘the green checkbox disappeared’

If there is no name on your certificate, then probably you didn’t provide a first name and surname when registering for the course.

No worries!

I’ll explain to you how to do it:

1. Go to your student profile and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
2. Click on ‘click here to change your name’
3. Write your first name and surname
– Important: the ‘display name’ (nickname) is sometimes pre-filled with the e-mail address; in this case you will need to change that as the nickname cannot be the e-mail address.

And now you can download the certificate again, with your name on it!

This is a video course with online exercises. It’s an automated product.

Let’s say you bought a book. You’re reading it, and something is not clear to you. Can you call the author?

No. Same here. I am a content creator. I try my best to create lessons that are clear. I try my best to improve the materials so that no questions should arrise. I can keep the price attractive because it’s automated. If you are looking for a teacher to ask questions, then I recommend to book our virtual classrooms or come to the Dutch Summer School or Winter School (which come at a different price).

Nevertheless, as a content creator. I am always open for suggestions to make the content better! Feel free to write me if you think my explanation of a certain lesson was confusing. I’m continuously updating our materials, trying to make them better. I will save your mail and consider it when doing a next upgrade.

I fully agree that fill-the-gap questions where you need to type the answer are very beneficial for learning a language. Yet, you will find mostly multiple choice questions on my website. Why is that?

I used to have more ‘fill-the-gap’ questions on the website, but I removed them.

It’s important to realise that the computer can only recognise an answer as correct, if it is ‘exactly’ correct. So, the exact alphanumerical sequence of characters as a pre-defined answer.

Now the problem:

1. In many fill-the-gap questions more correct answers will be possible; not always it’s possible to pre-define all possible answers. The result: the student might complete a correct answer, but then finds it is marked incorrect at the end of the test. And then the student will be confused.

2. People tend to hit the spacebar after a word, write a dot of some other character. It took me a very long time to find out why a lot of questions were marked in correct with some students. Until I found out: a lot of students simply hit the spacebar after a word. It’s impossible to spot the difference when checking the answers. But a lot of people do this as an automatism and then the answer is marked incorrect (because it’s not the same alphanumerical sequence).

3. People from all over the world do this course. Different keyboard languages, different keyboard settings, different symbols… The lesson about the plural for example. I want the students to know whether the plural of ‘camera’ is written with an apostrophe. But I don’t want to create confusion over the difference between this between ‘ , ˋ and ’.

I want my lessons to be understandable. After the lesson, the student should have the feeling he/she understood everything. The problem with fill-the-gap questions is that they create a possibility for confusion. If a student cannot understand why his/her answer was marked incorrect, he/she will be unhappy, be frustrated, lose motivation, and be unsatisfied.

In the past, when I had more fill-the-gap questions, I got e-mails regularly from people who reported that the program was not working properly.

Using ‘multiple choice’ provides the possibility to exercise exactly what is needed. I want you to doubt between a few possible options that are key to the lesson and the difference between the options is exactly what is taught in the lesson. Rather than a correct spelling, that is what I want you to remember from the lesson. The essence of learning is that you learn one thing at the time. An exercise should test one thing. If the lesson is about word order, we need to exercise word order. And then I don’t want to mark an answer incorrect because you did the word order right but the conjugation wrong.

Do you see ‘of’ or ‘from’ instead of the articles ‘de’ and ‘het’?
Or other repeating strange mistakes?

Please check if you don’t have an autotranslator installed in your browser.

The word ‘de’ is also a French word, and in French it means ‘of’ or ‘from’. An autotranslation extension could replace all the words ‘de’. So, if you see in front of a noun a translation of ‘from’ into your language, then most likely you need to switch this function off in your browser. The problem may occur in other words, but this is mostly reported and can help to identify the problem.

You pay per year*. Can’t finish in one year? No problem, then you can purchase an extra year.

Why?

I chose a simple pricing system.  I like to keep my accounting easy (the more time I have to spend on creating content). So 1 price for 1 year. That way I can keep the price attractive (any change in the duration has it’s effect on the price).

Combipack
The combipack has a discount. Essentially, the discount is a bonus, because it reduces the time you have per level. Time management is your own responsibility. Count on approximately 50 hours per level. So it’s up to you if you buy the 3 levels at once (as combipack) or one after the other as separate courses.

Why don’t I offer lifetime access?
How am I going to guarantee that you will have access for 50 years? What does it mean to make this a real 100% promise? It would require quite an investment and so it would be at a totally different price! What if I want to stop with my company? What if I want to sell the copyright to my materials? (don’t worry, I don’t have any plans in that direction).

Essentially, 1 year access is what I can promise to deliver.

This is an online program and like almost any software nowadays, it’s a subscription model. Where in the past software companies offered their products at a 1 time (large) fee (end then stopped support after a few years to launch a new version), nowadays you usually pay a much smaller fee per month or per year.

The difference between my product and many other subscriptions is that I don’t want to charge credit cards automatically after a year. I don’t want to hope that you forget about it and let me charge forever. For sure that would be very profitable. But my goal is that you have maximum value for the money you invest, so that’s why I ask you to actively re-purchase the course when the year is over.

* If you have access to #dutchgrammar as part of your participation at the Summer/Winter/E-Summer School, then the duration of access is only during the course (specified on the website of that course), you can always decide to purchase an additional year at learndutch.org

Yes. You will still be able to see all your green checkboxes. Your test results will be there. There is no need to start all over. Also, your course data is not deleted instantly, if you don’t extend access directly. So we keep the data at least a few months there.

That doesn’t last forever… I have to deal with a database that keeps growing. There are thousands of students on the website. Every student does hundreds of exercises, with 15-25 questions per exercise. That means millions and millions of answers on questions… I simply can’t keep all the data forever, because that would slow down the database and the performance of the website.

So once in while we simply have to delete old data of people whose paid subscription ended more than a few months ago.

For the Dutch Summer School / Dutch Winter School / E-summerschool, I developed, with my team, a method that combines the ‘Heb je zin?’ and ‘#dutchgrammar’ videos with lessons in a real classroom. A method of ‘blended learning’ where the videos are the homework, and in class we practise what we learned form the videos.

The book is called ‘Het Lesboek’ and we worked out the lessons entirely for the teacher, based on years of experience and best practises. Powerpoints, role plays, games etc.

One of the most frequently asked questions: where can I buy this book? The answer: we sell it exclusively to our summer/winter/e-summer school students. We developed a unique program, and we did that not in order to sell as many books as possible, but to attract as many students to our school as possible.

This is not a book for self study, it’s specifically for ‘in the lesson’ (that’s why the name is ‘Lesboek’), and therefore only makes sense to have the book while doing our program.

I list the price on my website without VAT (Value Added Tax). I put an * and further clarification that VAT will be added (if you’re inside Europe) during checkout.

The VAT rate in the Netherlands is 21%. Other EU-countries vary from 18-27%.

For example, if you purchase #dutchgrammar-1 while you are in the Netherlands, the total price will be 49 euros + 21% = 59,29 euros.

Why don’t I give a price including VAT?

This is an e-product. Within the EU there is a law, that the tax rate of the country of the customer should be applied for this type of product. The VAT-rate is different in every EU country. My website can only calculate the final price once it knows what country you are in. EU law even requires me to verify your IP address together with the address you put as billing address. The software on the website does that. So, what you will see when processing the order is that the VAT is added after you have input your address.

Outside the EU, no VAT will be charged.

It doesn’t work to trick the system!
… to purchase the course without VAT if you are physically inside the EU, by putting a billing address outside the EU.

The EU foresaw this, and that’s why it requires vendors to check the IP-address.

Every video of the following videos has a version with background music and a version without:
– 1000 most common words in Dutch
– #dutchgrammar-1, 2 and 3
– Heb je zin?

You can click the link below the video to watch the version without background music.

Why is there background music?
You might be surprised, but the video statistics are interesting: 95% watches the videos with background music and only 5% without. In addition, people who watch the videos with background music, watch on the average longer. I don’t know why, but it looks like the background helps to create the look & feel of a series, and perhaps helps it’s the Pavlov effect that to gets the mind ready for learning.

I don’t provide phone support for learndutch.org, only via e-mail.

Why? Simply, because most part of the day I’m working on the content and then my phone is swiched off.

I’m recording videos, I’m in front of a microphone, I’m writing lessons… I try to be as productive as possible. A creative process doesn’t allow to be interrupted.

And then one time per day, I’m behind my computer, answering mails, providing support.

I kindly ask you to read the information in this section on the website, and write me an e-mail if you can’t find the answers there.

The certificate that we provide at the end is a pdf, with your name on it, saying that you completed this course.

I often get the question if this certificate is recognised by the government.

Two important remarks:
1. Please think… One course (with exam) costs 49 euros + VAT (or 33 euros if you purchased it as part of the combipack). What would be the cost of a test under full supervision, guaranteeing an environment where the identity of the person is verified, and making sure there is no one helping the student… I don’t need to continue.

2. We have a saying in the Netherlands: ‘een slager die zijn eigen vlees keurt’. In English: a butcher who approves his own meat. In other words: what is the value of certificate given by a language school, if the same language school provides the test at the end. Isn’t it the language school’s interest to let everybody pass the exam to have a happy customer?

Certificates recognised by the Dutch government, are certificates given by the government. The governments does the testing.

Do you need a certain level of Dutch for your visa (MVV)?
Or do you need to pass ‘inburgering’?
Do you need a certain level of Dutch to get a Dutch passport?
Do want to study at a Dutch university?
Does your employer asks for an official certificate?

The Dutch governments takes these tests at their own test centers (and embassies), where they can verify the identity of every student. So if you need an official certificate backed by the government, like:
– civic integration exam abroad (level A1)
– civic integration exam (A2)
– NT2 – program 1 (B1)
– NT2 – program 2 (B2)
then it’s your own task to find a program to get you to that level, and then do the test at one of the testing centers. And yes, with what we offer, we can help you to get there (as described here).

Having over 160,000 followers on Youtube and thousands of people on my website every day is great. It’s the best compliment!

One of the biggest difficulties for me as a one-man company is to answer e-mails. With so many followers, I get hundreds of e-mails every day. At the same time, I want to use most hours of the day, spending on creating new content. Because without that content, you wouldn’t have found me in the first place!

1. Access
For sure, all the people who report issues with regard to access to their paid course will be treated with priority! I always try to solve technical issues within one working day. My mails might be very short though. If it’s 2 working days after you sent your e-mail aboout access to your paid course, feel free to send me a reminder.

2. How can I help?
I kindly ask you to have a look at the website first, especially at the roadmap to reach a certain level. This is how you I can help you to learn Dutch. Many of your questions will be answered there. And of course, please check this FAQ section first. I am glad to answer your questions, at the same time I hope you spend some time on the website first before asking.

3. Do you offer…?
I get a lot of questions asking about something that I don’t offer. The rule of thumb is easy: what I offer is on my website, what I don’t offer is not on my website. So unfortunately… no courses for children, no evening courses in Breda, no private tutoring, no similar method to learn Spanish… Unfortunately, I can’t help with recommendations.

4. Discounts
I know… it’s pretty Dutch to ask for a discount. But I don’t give them. I don’t negotiate. Everybody pays the same price. I love to keep my accounting as simple as possible (because I don’t want to spend much time on that either). I think that the courses that I make with my team, have proven themselves over time. It is my goal to provide you with the best value for money. To learn as much Dutch as possible for as little money as possible (it’s a lot cheaper than regular classroom prices, and many of you confirmed that my video courses are more effective).

5. Collaboration
I get lots of proposals for collaboration. Almost every day. Awesome! That in itself is a compliment! That means that organisations reach out to us and they value what I make. But… I’m pretty busy. I have very little time to work out new business ideas. I prefer to spend my time on improving what I do, instead of trying to find new ways to make money. It is my firm belief that the better I make the content, the longer it will last.

6. Your experiences
Your stories, your suggestions, your feedback, your reasons why you are learning Dutch. Please don’t stop sending your e-mails! I love to hear from you. I read everything! And I’m grateful that you share your experiences to me. I might not have the time to answer every e-mail. I want you to know that I really appreciate it!

Why don’t I hire someone to answer mails?
I prefer to be accessible. I prefer to answer in person. I’m the one who knows everything about my website. It wouldn’t be that easy to delegate that to someone else. And that would cost time as well… time, that I prefer to invest in making materials! I don’t want to hire a team of sales managers. I prefer to make content that sells itself. I try to create my lessons in a way that they are clear to the students (no need to ask questions). I try to make a website that is easy to navigate and clear to use. I try to provide the answers to your questions in this FAQ section.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the best customer support. I don’t have a call center ready to answer your questions. I won’t answer within a minute. I can’t answer every mail. That is part of dealing with a personal business with a full focus on creating the best content.