Australia, with Tasmania below.  Tasmania was part of Australia until about 10,000 years ago, when the oceans rose following the Ice Age.  It was named after the Dutch explorer, Able Tasman. Green and Gold are the national sporting colors of Australia.

Learn the Dutch Genders in One Day!*

Australia -HetØland!

 a world apart

       The secret to learning the Dutch grammatical genders amazingly fast is to focus on learning just neuter nouns with one syllable- there are about two hundred of them in common use.  The genders of more than 90% of all other Dutch nouns can then be determined by what sort of things they are, or by their beginnings or endings.

        To learn the 200 neuter monosyllable nouns easily, just use the following 'outlandish' pictures of Australia to lock the nouns in your memory as being things that are inherently different than, and set apart from, common-gender things. 

        To further enhance learning, the prefix 'Ø-'. which stands for 'Australia,'  is added to the pictionary words.  'Ø-' is pronounced like 'O-' and represents a globe with a line stretching from England down to Australia. (Although the standard pronunciation of 'Australia' in Dutch begins with an 'ow' sound, many native Dutch speakers pronounce the initial sound as an 'o'.)

        The supplemental 'Ø-' memory hack works because 1. it is ear- and eye-catching, 2. is easy for English speakers to pronounce, and 3. since 'o-' is almost never used as a prefix in common-gender words, 'Ø-' can arbitrarily be defined to be a neuter-gender prefix. A useful variant of the hack is to add the abbreviated article ' 't ', from 'het', to the words and then practice repeating the ' 't Ø-words' aloud.

     *The caveat to these techniques is that they do require that you recognize if a word is a noun, know approximately what the noun means, and know if it is derived from a verb or an adjective.  Knowing English is a big help because about half the words are nearly the same in both languages!

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Good Luck, Mates!

to OZ!