← All songs
A2-

Leef

André Hazes Jr.

Language
Dutch
Released
2015
Genre
levenslied
Level
A2-
Difficulty score
513
Duration
3:37

How to study this song

“Leef” carries 14 Dutch words, 9 adjectives and 17 verb forms — 40 study entries in all, graded A2-. The glossary is the place to begin — bar, dag and dagen are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 9 adjectives alongside 14 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. 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
barbarbarrabanconecomptoirbalcãoTheke
dagdaydíagiornojourdiaTag
dagendaysdíasgiornijoursdiasTage
geldmoneydinerosoldiargentdinheiro

What this song teaches you

Level · A2-

Vocabulary words
14
Adjectives
9
Word combos
8
Expressions
11
Verb forms
17
Quiz questions
35

More Dutch songs at this level

  • Stiekem — Maan ft. Goldband (2022)A2
  • Als het avond is — Suzan & Freek (2018)A2-
  • Rood — Marco Borsato (2006)A2+
  • Zoutelande — BLØF ft. Geike Arnaert (2017)A2+

Background

About the song

«Leef» is the song that turned André Hazes Jr. from the son of a famous father into a singer with a signature song of his own. He was born in Woerden on 21 January 1994, the youngest son of André Hazes, the most celebrated Dutch folk singer of his generation. The country first met him in 2004, when, aged ten, he read a short text at his father’s public farewell in the Amsterdam ArenA, broadcast live to an audience of about five million. Three years later, at thirteen, he reached number one on the Dutch Top 40 with «Bedankt mijn vriend», a posthumous duet in which his new vocal was laid over an old recording of his father. After that came two albums with his sister Roxeanne and a string of modest releases — until this one.

The single came out in the summer of 2015 on Dino Music. It was written by Edwin van Hoevelaak, who also produced it, together with Koen Jansen — better known as the rapper Diggy Dex — Chiel Ottink and Arno Krabman. It runs three minutes and thirty-seven seconds and belongs squarely to the levenslied, the Dutch tradition of big-hearted popular song about ordinary lives, drink, love and loss that his father had defined for decades. What the writers did with that tradition is make it a parable: instead of a love song, it is a piece of advice passed from an old man to a young one.

The story is simple and told in the past tense. On a Friday evening in an Amsterdam pub, the singer falls into conversation with an elderly stranger at the bar who knows he has only a few days left. The man looks back on a life spent working hard and earning well, and admits that he never really lived: his marriage fell apart, he laughed too rarely and cried too often. His conclusion, delivered as the chorus, is an instruction to the younger man to seize every day as if it were the last. Dutch Wikipedia describes the scene as an encounter the singer is said to have had with a terminally ill man; the song itself never says whether it happened, and it does not need to.

The video takes the premise literally. It was filmed in an Amsterdam bar, and the old man is played by the actor Bartho Braat, familiar to Dutch viewers from the long-running soap «Goede tijden, slechte tijden». After the conversation the two walk the streets of the city together, including the Lindengracht in the Jordaan, a neighbourhood closely associated with the Amsterdam levenslied.

Verbomatico
Learn:English·Spanish·Italian·Dutch·French·Portuguese·German
Home·Songs·Guides·Pricing·About·Contact·Install the app·Terms·Privacy·Refunds
Legal notice··

© 2026 Verbomatico

Geld

This card holds 10 more words. You meet them when you play the song.

Adjectives

NLENESITFRPTDE
affinished, doneterminado, acabadofinitofiniacabadofertig
anderother, someone elseotro, otra personaaltro, un altroautre, quelqu’un d’autreoutro, outra pessoaanderer, ein anderer

This card holds 7 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.

Verb forms

NLENESITFRPTDE
zatsatestaba sentadosedevaétait assisestava sentadosaß
zeisaiddijodisseditdissesagte
hadhadtenía, habíaavevaavaittinhahatte
pakgrab, takecoge, agarraprendiprendsagarranimm, pack
gagoveva’vavaigeh
leeflivevivevivivisvivelebe

This card holds 11 more verb forms. You meet them when you play the song.

For a learner of Dutch, «Leef» is an unusually clear lesson in how the language tells a story. The verses are in the past: irregular simple-past forms that must be learnt by heart, a pluperfect built with had plus a participle, and a whole run of bare participles where the auxiliary has been dropped, as people do when they list what happened. Those participles show three different patterns side by side — ge- at the front, no ge- at all after the prefix ver-, and ge- tucked inside a separable verb. The chorus then switches to the present and to the imperative, which in Dutch is simply the bare stem of the verb, and it hangs everything on alsof, a conjunction that sends the verb to the end of its clause. Add two colloquial pronouns that the spoken language uses for he and his, and a handful of fixed expressions about work and money, and a very short vocabulary covers a great deal of grammar.

Did you know?

One of the four writers is better known under another name: Koen Jansen is the rapper Diggy Dex. The song was produced by Edwin van Hoevelaak, another of its co-writers.

The old man in the video is played by Bartho Braat, an actor most Dutch viewers know from the soap «Goede tijden, slechte tijden». The final scenes follow the two characters along the Lindengracht in Amsterdam’s Jordaan.

For a song now considered a classic, its chart record in the Netherlands is strikingly thin. It never entered the Top 40 — not even its Tipparade, the waiting list below it — and it only reached the Single Top 100 at the turn of 2017 and 2018, for two weeks, at numbers 93 and 97. It grew instead on the Oranje Top 30, a chart for Dutch-language music, and through radio requests.

Flanders embraced it far more openly. It climbed to number three on the Ultratop 50 and spent twenty-eight weeks on that chart, and during Music For Life 2018, the Flemish charity radio week, it was the second most requested song of all.

Its rise in the NPO Radio 2 Top 2000, the Dutch all-time list voted by listeners, was sudden: it entered in 2017 at 1684 and a year later jumped 1532 places to 152.

It has also been voted into «Het Foute Uur», the Qmusic hour of guilty-pleasure songs — a sign of how the song works in the Netherlands, as a sing-along for bars and parties as much as a serious ballad.

André Hazes Jr. had his first Top 40 hit at thirteen, in 2007, and then waited almost eighteen years for the second — «Ze komt uit Amsterdam», with Kris Kross Amsterdam and Tabitha, in 2025. His best-known song, «Leef», falls in the middle of that gap and never counted towards it.

Charts & streaming

The single was released in the summer of 2015 on Dino Music. In the Netherlands it was not a chart hit in the usual sense: it missed the Top 40 and its Tipparade entirely, reached the Tipparade of the Single Top 100 in 2015, and entered the Single Top 100 itself only at the turn of 2017 and 2018, for two weeks, peaking at number 93. It was nevertheless certified double platinum in the Netherlands, which shows how long and how steadily it kept selling and streaming.

In Flanders the single peaked at number three on the Ultratop 50 and stayed on the chart for twenty-eight weeks; it was also certified double platinum in Belgium.

The parent album, also called «Leef», followed on 11 March 2016 on Dino Music. It reached number two on the Dutch Album Top 100, where it spent thirty-five weeks, and number three on the Flemish Ultratop 200, where it stayed for one hundred and thirty-seven weeks — well over two and a half years. It was certified gold in Belgium.

The NPO Radio 2 Top 2000 gives the clearest picture of its afterlife. After entering at 1684 in 2017, the song rose to 152 in 2018, held 179 in 2019 and 256 in 2020, and has remained on the list every year since, at 1011 in 2025.