Dutch · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "de maand" in Dutch?

duh MAHNT — long open "aah," and the final d is said as a t.

de maand /də ˈmaːnt/

A single beat with a long vowel and a consonant cluster, which makes it heavier than its four sounds suggest. The plural adds a schwa and splits the cluster, so "maanden" flows more easily than the singular.

Listen: de maand

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

m Lips together, voice on, released into the long vowel.

aa Stretch it: the nd cluster afterwards will cut it off abruptly, so it needs its full duration first.

nd Both consonants said, and the d devoices to t at the end of the word. The plural "maanden" restores the genuine d between vowels.

Hear it in a sentence

Vorige maand was ik in Parijs.

Last month I was in Paris.

Listen: Vorige maand was ik in Parijs.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Vorige maand was ik in Parijs" fronts the time expression, which forces the verb ahead of the subject — the inversion Dutch applies whenever anything but the subject opens the sentence. The adjective "vorige" takes -e because "maand" is a de-word.

Where English speakers slip

Voicing the final d is the reliable error, since the spelling shows one. It is a t. Learners also clip the long vowel, which pulls the word toward a non-existent "mant." And the English "month" offers no help at all here — the two words share an ancestor but almost no sounds.