Compliments, Thanks and Responses

A compliment and the thanks it provokes are a two-part exchange: someone says something nice, and the other person has to answer. English speakers usually arrive in Afrikaans with the first half intact and the second half broken — they can manage a clipped dankie, but they freeze on the reply to a compliment and reach for a stiff word-for-word jy is welkom that no Afrikaans speaker uses. This page teaches the whole pair: how to give a compliment, how to thank warmly, and — the bit competitors skip — how to answer both with the modest, friendly replies that make you sound like a local rather than a textbook.

Paying a compliment: the exclamative Wat 'n...!

The most idiomatic frame for an admiring remark is the exclamative Wat 'n...! ("What a...!"). It puts the noun phrase right up front, with the article 'n ("a/an"), and it carries genuine warmth — far more than a flat statement like Dit is mooi.

Note the apostrophe in 'n: it is not optional and not a stray mark. 'n is the indefinite article, a reduced form of an older een, and it is always written with a leading apostrophe and a space after it. Wat n tuin and Wat ʼn tuin (curly mark) are both wrong; it is 'n with a straight apostrophe.

You can also compliment with a plain declarative sentence — Jou hare lyk mooi — and this is extremely common in everyday speech. The exclamative is the warmer, more enthusiastic register; the declarative is the easy default.

The everyday evaluative words: mooi, lekker, oulik, gaaf

Afrikaans leans on a small set of high-frequency adjectives to praise things, and each has its own flavour. Choosing the right one is half of sounding natural.

The trickiest of these for English speakers is lekker, because it covers far more ground than its dictionary gloss "tasty." A holiday is lekker, a song is lekker, a Saturday afternoon is lekker. It is the all-purpose word for an experience that feels good, and reaching for it in the right place is one of the fastest ways to sound at home.

Thanking: from dankie to baie dankie to dankie tog

The bare thank-you is dankie, and unlike English thanks it is fully neutral — you can say it to a friend, a stranger, or a shop assistant without sounding too casual. To warm it up, you intensify it.

Watch the last one. Dankie tog does not mean "thank you" to someone — the particle tog turns it into an expression of relief, like English thank goodness or thank heavens. You say it when something feared did not happen, not when a person did you a favour.

To name what you are grateful for, use the preposition vir ("for"): dankie *vir die hulp ("thanks for the help"), dankie **vir alles ("thanks for everything"). To thank someone for *doing something, use a dat-clause: dankie *dat jy gekom het* ("thank you for coming," literally "thanks that you came").

Answering a compliment: deflect, don't accept

Here is where the cultural grain of Afrikaans differs from English, and where most learners go wrong. The expected response to a compliment is not a confident thank you that simply banks the praise — it is a warm deflection that passes the warmth back. The two go-to moves are a soft Ag, dankie (the particle ag signalling modest, almost shy pleasure) and a compliment returned to the giver.

The little word ag (pronounced with the throaty g, like a softened sigh) is doing real pragmatic work: it signals that you are pleasantly embarrassed and not taking the praise too seriously. A bare confident Dankie with no ag can read as slightly self-satisfied, the way an unhedged "Yes, I know" would in English.

Answering thanks: dis 'n plesier and dis niks

This is the half-exchange English speakers most reliably break. After baie dankie, you must give a reply — and the natural replies are warmer and more generous than English "you're welcome." The two pillars are Dis 'n plesier ("It's a pleasure") and the deflecting Dis niks ("It's nothing").

Dis 'n plesier is the gold-standard reply: it literally hands the other person the idea that helping them was a pleasure for you. Dis niks ("it's nothing," often softened to Ag, dis niks) waves the favour away as too small to thank for — exactly the generous deflection the culture prizes. Both are far warmer than a transactional welkom, which is not even idiomatic here.

Note the apostrophe again in dis 'n plesier: dis is a fused dit is ("it is"), and it is followed by the article 'n. The whole phrase is dit is 'n plesier compressed into everyday speech.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Pay an enthusiastic compliment with the exclamative Wat 'n...! (note the apostrophe in 'n), or a simple declarative like Jou hare lyk mooi.
• Match the evaluative word to what you praise: mooi (looks), lekker (experiences), oulik (cute/clever), gaaf (kind people and acts) — and remember it is gaaf *van jou*.
• Warm up thanks with baie dankie; reserve dankie tog for relief ("thank goodness"), not gratitude to a person. Name the reason with vir or a dat-clause.
• Deflect a compliment with Ag, dankie rather than accepting it smoothly — the ag carries the expected modesty.
• Answer thanks with Dis 'n plesier or the deflecting Ag, dis niks — both warmer than a stiff welkom, which Afrikaans does not use here.