This book is a continuation of the book 'I always get my sin'. 'I always get my sin' was a bestseller and more then 250,000 books are sold. Both books are written by Maarten H. Rijkens. In 'We always get our sin' he writes about funny or stupid mistakes Dutch people make when they try to speak English and about how to avoid these mistakes.
There are different kind of mistakes Mr. Rijkens tells about and every chapter deals with another kind of mistakes you can make. Each chapter begins with a foreword of the writer in Denglish, English with a Dutch twist. The first chapter is called: False friends. It is about sentences with English words that look a lot like Dutch words but do not mean the same thing. If you say 'I always get my sin', you might mean: I always get what I want. The Dutch word 'zin' looks a lot like 'sin', but the translation of sin does not look like the translation of 'zin'. English speaking people can have these problems too if they are in Holland. If you look at a photocopier for example and you see 'Storing', you might think the machine is storing information or something. It means that the machine is out of order, instead.
The second chapter is about Dutch expressions that are literally translated to English. It is called 'You are on glad ice'. When a Dutchman says that, he means 'you are skating on thin ice'. He translates the Dutch expression 'Je bent op glad ijs' very literally.
The third chapter is about Dutch grammar which does not conform with English grammar, when translated. A good example is 'Forget it but!'. The right translation is 'Forget it!', but because English and Dutch look a lot like each other, people sometimes think you have to translate every word separately
Another chapter deals with words translated almost right, but not totally. An example: Accuse me, instead of excuse me. One chapter deals with words that sound well in English, but are not the right translating. An example of this is: The ship walked fast in the Maas. The speaker means with this sentence that the ship was grounded in the Maas River. Of course the sentence was translated wrong. Vast in Dutch means something like stuck in English. If you make it sound like something English, you get the word fast.
I thought it was a really funny book, which is also nice to read for English speaking. This is because the prefaces are in 'English'.
