De diepte
S10
How to study this song
Learning “De diepte” means 43 entries at A2+ — 12 Dutch words, 8 adjectives and 23 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Start with the glossary: avond and dagen come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 23 distinct forms against 8 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
| NL | EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| avond | evening | tarde, noche | sera | soir | noite | Abend |
| dagen | days | días | giorni | jours | dias | Tage |
This card holds 10 more words. You meet them when you play the song.
Adjectives
| NL | EN | ES | IT |
|---|
What this song teaches you
Level · A2+
- Vocabulary words
- 12
- Adjectives
- 8
- Word combos
- 5
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 23
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Dutch songs at this level
Background
About the song
«De diepte» was the Dutch entry at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, and it was a deliberate break with habit. It is sung entirely in Dutch — the first Dutch entry to be so since Sieneke in 2010, after a run of songs sung mostly in English. The broadcaster AVROTROS chose the artist internally and announced her on 7 December 2021. The song itself was unveiled on 3 March 2022 at the Tuschinski theatre in Amsterdam, played on NPO Radio 2 the same day, and released together with a video directed by Cas Mulder.
S10 is Stien den Hollander, born in Hoorn, North Holland, on 8 November 2000, and raised in Abbekerk and Hoorn. She started out alone: in 2016, as a teenager, she put a mini-album called «Antipsychotica» on SoundCloud, recorded with little more than a pair of phone headphones. A rapper, Jiggy Djé, heard it and brought her to the label Noah’s Ark, which signed her in 2017. Her early records sit between rap, pop and something much quieter, and her debut album «Snowsniper» won an Edison, the main Dutch music prize, in the alternative category in 2020. She has spoken openly about the depression and psychotic episodes she went through between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and several of her album titles are named after psychiatric medicines.
She wrote «De diepte» in 2021 with the producer Arno Krabman, who also produced it. She has said that it was a year in which she felt so empty that she wrote only three songs, and that this one began from a single image and grew from there, more by instinct than by plan. When she had to choose between two possible Eurovision songs, she thought of them as colours: one felt yellowish, this one dark blue, and dark blue felt right. She calls it a love letter to her own sadness — an ode to the grief and the memories people carry with them — and says she hopes that anyone who listens feels a little less alone.
The recording is short, just under three minutes, and very bare at the start: a voice, a few chords, and space around every word. The lyric is built from a small number of plain images — endless rain, darkness, hiding, waiting, a name that keeps coming back — and most of its power comes from repetition rather than from new information. That makes it an unusually clear song for a learner. The vocabulary is basic and concrete (a table, a hand, eyes, teeth, a child, an evening), and the grammar is the everyday grammar of spoken Dutch: yes/no questions with the verb in front, a clause with «dat» that sends the verb to the end, a modal verb that pushes two infinitives to the back of the sentence, and a couple of fixed expressions that every Dutch speaker knows, one for not being able to see anything in the dark and one for gritting your teeth.