About
A small note on the project.
cefr.nl is a personal site for practising Dutch — built by a learner, for learners, and shared on the open web because the material might as well be useful to more than one person.
The name
cefr.nl is not affiliated with the Council of Europe, who maintain the official Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The Council doesn't publish an official Dutch wordlist — the framework describes levels of ability, not specific vocabulary.
The A1 – C1 labels on this site are the author's own judgement. Teaching materials and academic lexicons were a useful starting point (see Sources), but rather than averaging across conflicting labels, we went back to what the CEFR actually asks of a learner at each level — what they should be able to read, say, and understand — and assigned words from there. Other lists may differ; that reflects genuine ambiguity at the edges of any level. The labels here are a guide for choosing what to practise next, not a placement and not a certification.
How it's run
Free to use. No sign-in, no analytics, no third-party tracking. Your progress — what you've practised, what you're struggling with, your custom lists — lives entirely in your browser's local storage. Clearing your browser data clears your progress; moving to a different machine starts you fresh.
The only network traffic from the page is loading the word data and audio files. Nothing about your answers leaves your device.
How the practice adapts
You begin by reading the Dutch and giving the English. Once a word starts to feel familiar the direction flips — you'll see the English and build the Dutch from its parts.
What's tricky for you comes back more often. The site keeps quiet track of which words are settling in and which aren't, weighted by a simple ratio of correct to incorrect attempts. There's no schedule to manage and no streak to defend — just practice when you can, in whatever section suits the mood.
Etymology and decomposition
Most of the Dutch words on the site are accompanied by a breakdown into smaller pieces — a prefix, a root, a suffix — with a note on what each piece tends to mean. The same pieces recur in dozens of other words, and recognising them is the single fastest route from seen this word before to can guess the next one cold.
The decompositions are hand-curated, with a rule-based splitter proposing candidates that get reviewed by the author. They are pedagogical rather than philological — a working tool for a learner, not a claim about the historical etymology of Dutch.
Sources and credit
The words, sentences, illustrations, and audio on this site each come from somewhere. Where the origin is clear it's attributed; where the site draws on a wide range of teaching material, the sources are named rather than any single book reproduced. The CEFR level assigned to each word is the author's own call, based on reading what each level requires of a learner. Full detail is on the Sources page.
Get in touch
Thoughts, corrections, and suggestions are very welcome. If a word is at the wrong level, an example sentence sounds odd, or something on the site is just broken — please do say so. It's a small project, and feedback is genuinely the best way things get fixed.
You can reach the author at cefr.nl@outlook.com.