Een muziekdoosje, een handicap en representatie in kunst
C1 Dutch listening practice · Flemish Dutch · Curated for advanced learners
What does “chinoiserie” mean in Dutch?
Chinoiserie is one of those words Dutch borrows from French and never naturalises. It names the European fashion (peaking in the 1700s) for furniture, lacquerware and porcelain decorated with imagined “Chinese” motifs: dragons, pagodas, blossoms. The Dutch East India Company made the Netherlands one of Europe’s main importers, which is why the word still surfaces in Dutch art-history class without translation.
In this Brainwash monologue the speaker describes a childhood trinket box (“een soort zwart glimmend bootje met oriëntaalse motieven”) as chinoiserie van de meest goedkope soorten, then catches herself: she only loved it because the broken-armed dancer inside looked like her. Loanword, decorative style, pivot to disability representation.
Vocabulary frequency
How common is the vocabulary in this C1 Dutch listening practice listening practice?
General Dutch frequency
Spoken Dutch frequency
Words above this video’s level
Quick glosses for vocabulary that goes beyond this video’s C1 level.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-NL 2014 (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.
- ▸In the Asian-export collections at Rijksmuseum, Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
- ▸In VOC and Delft pottery scholarship from the Royal Delft archive and Princessehof Leeuwarden
- ▸In Flemish reporting on disability representation in the arts by De Standaard, Knack and Bruzz
- ▸In design-history programming on VPRO, Canvas and the Kunststof podcast on NPO Radio 1