Words like maar, eens andeven

Kijk eens!Kom maar.Wil je de deur even(tjes) opendoen?Ga eens even opzij.Kijk maar eens even door deze bril.

Although these sentences are hardly considered difficult tounderstand, they are not really easy to translate intoEnglish. They could result in something like:

Hey, look!Just come over here, please.Would you (please) just open the door?Just move aside.(Come on) just look through these glasses.

The problem is, that those little words like maar, eensandeven(tjes) do not only have a literal meaning (but,once,shortly), but also a modifying function in the sentence. In alot of cases you could say that they mean something likejust,and are squeezed into the sentence to make it less direct and more polite. In fact, if you take a commanding sentence,you can just 'soften' it, by putting one (or some) of thosewords in it.For example kom hier is a quite rude command, whilekom eenshier or kom even hier is a lot more friendly andkom maarhier could even be something like a very invitinggesture.

There are a few more words with similar functions, thoughmaar, eens and even are the most frequentlyused. Take for example gewoon and hoor:

Je moet gewoon naar de tandarts.Nou, tot ziens, hoor.

Here too, you could use just in your translation intoEnglish:

You just have to go to the dentist.Well, just goodbye then.

Generally, whenever you notice those words are not makingsensewhen you assign their literal meaning to them, you could leavethemout, get the meaning of the sentence without them and keepin mind that someone is trying to be polite here.

But if you want to use those words correctly yourself, thebest thingyou could do is probably to analyze their use for a while,because they all have their specific contexts. It isimpossible to give rules for that, but I noticed that a lot ofstudents were able to develop a good sense for it, just byreading,listening and analyzing.

To give some indications (remember, these are no rules,just vague patterns):

• maar means often just in a reassuring way,
• eens and even often mean just in thesense of a friendly come on or just hey, oreven please (mag ik even bellen - can Imake a phone call please),
• gewoon mostly means just in the sense of 'nobig deal',
• hoor often means something like hey or Isay, but watch out:the meaning is very much depending on the tone of the voiceand canvary from a reassuring to a reprimanding hey.