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A1+

Parijs

Kenny B

Language
Dutch
Released
2015
Genre
reggae
Level
A1+
Difficulty score
477
Duration
3:13

How to study this song

Learning “Parijs” means 37 entries at A1+ — 10 Dutch words, 7 adjectives and 20 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Begin with parijs and morgen: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 20 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

NLENESITFRPTDE
parijsParisParísParigiParisParisParis
morgenmorningmañanamattinamatinmanhãMorgen

This card holds 8 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

NLENESIT

What this song teaches you

Level · A1+

Vocabulary words
10
Adjectives
7
Word combos
5
Expressions
10
Verb forms
20
Quiz questions
35

More Dutch songs at this level

  • Bloed, Zweet en Tranen — André Hazes (2002)A1+
  • Traag — Bizzey feat. Jozo & Kraantje Pappie (2017)A2-
  • Pijnstiller — Suzan & Freek (2026)A2+
  • Brabant — Guus Meeuwis (2003)A2-

Background

About the song

«Parijs» is the song that made a fifty-three-year-old Surinamese reggae singer the biggest Dutch-language hit of 2015. It was released on 20 March 2015 by the Amsterdam label Top Notch, and it was written by Joost Jellema, Memru Renjaan and Kenny B himself, with Jellema and Renjaan also producing. The recording was made in 2014, and the writing happened partly in the studio and partly at home in Tilburg, the city in the south of the Netherlands where the singer lives. Kenny B has said that he thought it was still too early for him to put out a single in the Dutch market and that he had to be talked into it. The track runs three minutes and fifteen seconds.

The man behind the name is Kenneth Bron, born in Paramaribo, Suriname, on 1 November 1961. His life before music was not a musician’s life at all: he joined the Surinamese national army in 1980, rose to the rank of political commissar, and between 1989 and 1991 took part in the peace talks that ended the country’s civil war, dealing with figures such as Ronnie Brunswijk and Desi Bouterse. Only afterwards did he settle in the Netherlands and build a career in music, at first singing in English, in Sranantongo and in Aukaans, the languages of Suriname and its interior. He had real success at home in Suriname with «A sama de», but he was almost unknown to the general Dutch public. «Parijs» was only his second single in Dutch, and it changed that within weeks.

The story the song tells is small, sunny and complete. On a fresh morning in Paris the singer is going about his own business when he sees a strikingly beautiful woman walking past in high heels. He is so struck that he cannot think of anything to say, and what finally comes out of his mouth is schoolbook French: a greeting, a term of endearment, and a compliment to a mademoiselle. The joke is in her answer. She replies in French — and what she says in French is that she is Dutch, and that she only speaks a little of the language he has just tried on her. So he switches, and the chorus becomes a request: speak Dutch to me, just a little Dutch to me. He then imagines the evening they could spend together looking at the Champs-Élysées, at Notre-Dame, at the Seine and afterwards at the Eiffel Tower. In the second verse he can hardly believe his luck, watches her laugh shyly, and compares her to three famous Dutch women — the model Doutzen Kroes and the singers Edsilia Rombley and Anouk — which is the one line a foreign listener needs a footnote for. In the very last chorus the destination quietly changes: instead of climbing the Eiffel Tower, the two of them land together at Schiphol. They are going home, and they are going home together.

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FR
PT
DE
frissefreshfrescafrescafraîchefrescafrisch
mooiebeautifulguapa, bonitabellabellebonitaschön

This card holds 5 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

NLENESITFRPTDE
zieI seeveovedoje voisvejoich sehe
weetI knowsésoje saisseiich weiß
zegI saydigodicoje disdigoich sage
zegtsaysdicediceditdizsagt
zeisaiddije, dijodissi, dissej’ai dit, elle a ditdissesagte
zeggento saydecirdirediredizersagen
moetmust, have totengo quedevoje doistenho deich muss
praatspeakhablaparlaparlefalasprich

This card holds 12 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For someone learning Dutch the song is unusually friendly. Almost everything in it is present tense, the sentences are short, and the vocabulary is the vocabulary of an ordinary morning: morning, feeling, heels, word, together, to talk, to look, to laugh, to believe. Around that core there are exactly the four structures that make Dutch feel different from English or from a Romance language. The first is the imperative that opens the chorus, a bare verb form used to ask someone to do something. The second is the verb that jumps to the end of a subordinate clause, which happens three times in the song and is the thing learners trip over most. The third is the simple past of the narrative verse — a mixture of strong forms that change their vowel and weak forms that add an ending. The fourth is the small unstressed word that softens a request, the Dutch particle «even», which has no clean translation in English and which native speakers drop into almost every polite sentence.

And then there is the French. The song is bilingual on purpose: the greeting, the compliment, the woman’s reply and the repeated declaration of love at the end are all in French, and the Paris landmarks keep their French names. Musically it is reggae — a relaxed one-drop groove, a warm bass line, guitar on the offbeat — sung in a soft Surinamese-Dutch accent that was itself part of the appeal. It sounded like nothing else in the Dutch charts of 2015, which is exactly why it stayed there.

Did you know?

The single was the 750th number one in the history of the Nederlandse Top 40, a chart that has been running since 1965. It reached that milestone on 25 April 2015 and then stayed at the top for seven consecutive weeks, until 12 June.

Kenny B was fifty-three when the song went to number one, which made him the oldest artist ever to reach number one with a debut entry in the Dutch Mega Top 50, a list that goes back to 1963.

On 2 May 2015, barely a week after the song reached the top, the first parody appeared on YouTube: a man from Amsterdam singing to a woman from Rotterdam and asking her to speak Amsterdam to him instead. Dozens of imitations followed in regional languages and dialects from all over the Netherlands and Flanders, which is how a chart hit turned into a running national joke.

The record was named «Alarmschijf», the weekly award that Dutch radio gives to a single it expects to become a hit, and on 21 May 2015 the listeners and viewers of the urban station FunX voted it best single.

The music video was filmed in Paris, and the song was promoted on the main Dutch television programmes of the moment, among them the nightly talk show «De Wereld Draait Door» and the entertainment programme «RTL Boulevard».

Before he ever sang in Dutch, Kenny B had a completely different career: he served in the Surinamese national army from 1980, became a political commissar, and took part in the peace negotiations that ended the Surinamese civil war between 1989 and 1991, before moving to the Netherlands and turning to music full time.

The success was not a one-off in his own country either. The single spent six weeks at number one in the Suriname Top 40, and over the following years the singer accumulated sixteen number ones on Surinamese radio.

Later came the kind of recognition that has nothing to do with the charts: he sang in the Dutch-language version of Disney animation in 2016, took part in the television programme «Beste Zangers» in 2017, won the Willem Wilminkprijs for Dutch-language songwriting in 2018, and in November 2025 was made a commander of the Order of the Yellow Star.

Charts & streaming

In the Netherlands the single topped both national charts. It was number one on the Nederlandse Top 40 for seven weeks, from 25 April to 12 June 2015, and number one on the Single Top 100 for nine weeks, from 18 April to 19 June 2015. It became the most successful Dutch-language hit of the year.

The record was certified seven times platinum. It sold more than 50,000 copies and was streamed around 20 million times, figures that were exceptional for a Dutch-language release at a time when streaming was only beginning to dominate the market.

In Belgium the song crossed over to Flanders without quite repeating the Dutch result: it reached number twelve on the VRT Top 30 and number fifteen on the Ultratop 50. In the singer’s country of birth it went to number one on the Suriname Top 40 and stayed there for six weeks.

The album that carried it, the self-titled «Kenny B», was released in May 2015 and went straight to number one on the Dutch album chart, where it spent one week at the top before settling into a long run further down.