Listen, there’s a lot to be mispronounced when you first arrive in the Netherlands. You’ll order yourself a “str-oooohp-wafel”, you’ll say “dank-ooh-well,” and then you’ll probably plan a trip to the “ri-jick-es-museum.”
The what?
Y’know, the “rig-echs-museum.”
Can you guess which heavily mispronounced tourist attraction we’re butchering? The one and only Rijksmuseum, of course!
The most mispronounced museum in the world
It turns out we’re not the only ones who tend to scramble our sounds when trying to say “Rijksmuseum.” In fact, according to a survey by HawaiinIslands, the Rijksmuseum is the most mispronounced museum in the whole world.
As part of the survey, the pronunciation site Forvo was used to determine how many searches were done to check the pronunciation of a number of famous tourist destinations in each country across the globe.
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With a whopping 98,000 listens on Forvo, the Dutch tourist attraction won the title of most difficult museum name to wrap your tongue around — all hail queen “rich-ex-museum!” 👑
However, the Rijksmuseum isn’t the only Dutchie to find itself sitting in the list of top 20 most difficult museum names in the world.
The pronunciation of the Kröller-Müller museum also had to be listened to 6,000 times, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen enjoyed 5,000 listeners.
Pffft, silly silly tourists. (👀).
Well, how do you pronounce it then?
As a team of internationals with inflated egos, we can confidently say that the correct way to pronounce Rijksmuseum is — to listen to this Dutch woman say it in this advert.
Nailed it? Now you can learn how to pronounce gefeliciteerd!
What do you think is the most difficult Dutch word to pronounce? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!
Rakes museum. Seems easy enough.
Isn’t Scheveningen harder to pronounce?
Anything with an initial “g” followed by the dreaded “sch”: who wants to study Dutch history when you have to try to pronounce “geschiedenis”.
And surely the name of the Van Gogh Museum gets mangled as often as the Rijksmuseum.
No, the most mispronounced museum us the Van Gogh Museum, not the Rijksmuseum. The correct Dutch pronounciation of Van Gogh is far different from our English speaking friends. The English speaker pronounces it as “Van” (like a car transportation van), and Gogh as the Emglish word “Go”.
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