Learn Dutch: Is het kind klein? - Is the child small?

In Dutch, nouns are categorized into two gender groups: common and neuter. The word for child, kind, is a neuter noun, so it uses the neuter article het. Common nouns use de. Because there are very few rules to guess the gender, you should always memorize the article along with the noun!

Doesn't the word het mean "it"?

It can! Het translates to both the pronoun "it" and the neuter article "the". When you see het placed directly in front of a noun like kind, it acts as the article meaning "the".

What happens to het if I want to talk about multiple children?

If we make kind plural (kinderen), the article changes to de. In Dutch, all plural nouns use de for "the", even if their singular form uses het. So "Are the children small?" would be Zijn de kinderen klein?.

Why is it just klein and not kleine?

Because the adjective comes after the noun it describes, separated by the verb is. When adjectives are used after the verb to state a fact about the noun like this, they always stay in their basic dictionary form without an extra -e.