The language of the exam is a decision you make once and then live with: it shapes how you study, how fast you read, and whether you understand a question the way it was meant. It is also one of the few choices around the exam that costs money straight away. This lesson puts the forms side by side, says what each one solves and what it does not, and then gets to the part that matters most: the bridge from the Dutch legal word to what it actually means.
What the exam language does and does not decide
The theory exam exists in Dutch and in English. There are no other languages: Russian and Ukrainian do not exist as exam languages, and no fee changes that. Your choice decides which language the question appears in on screen — not what material you get and not how much time you have. It is 50 questions in 30 minutes, and for the car, category B, you need 44 correct answers, equally so in either language. How the exam day itself runs, and which pass marks the other categories have, is in how the exam works; this lesson is only about the language and the words.
What each option costs
There are three language options: Dutch, English, and the form with an interpreter or individual supervision. The fourth row, extra time, is in the table only for comparison: it has nothing to do with language, as you read further down.
| Option | CBR rate |
|---|---|
| Dutch | € 50.50 |
| English | € 57.00 |
| With extra time | € 64.00 |
| With an interpreter or individually supervised | € 118.50 |
The surcharge for English is € 6.50 and applies to the car category only. Extra time costs € 13.50 on top of the base rate. Watch the last amount in particular: € 118.50 is the CBR's full rate, not a surcharge on top of € 50.50 — and the interpreter is not included in it. Every item together is listed in what a licence really costs; when you book and what you bring is in the whole process.
What English removes and what it leaves
English removes the reading barrier, and only that. If your English is stronger than your Dutch you will read the question faster, hesitate less over the sentence structure and keep more attention for the situation in the picture. That is a real gain, because the clock keeps running while you re-read.
What English does not remove is the law underneath. The question is translated, the concepts are not. Where Dutch has two words with a legal boundary between them, English keeps one stem with a qualifier attached: bromfiets is «moped», snorfiets is «light moped». The boundary moves out of the word and into the qualifier, and the qualifier is not there in the question: anyone who knows only the English stem cannot see the boundary the question is testing. So the English exam is not a shortcut around the concepts — it is the same road with an easier signpost.
The interpreter and the individually supervised form
The CBR applies a single rate to the exam with an interpreter and to the individually supervised exam. You do get more time: the exam then runs 45 minutes instead of 30. But the longer slot is not a favour you can ask for because you read slowly: 45 minutes belong to three situations — an exam with extra time, an exam with an interpreter and an individually supervised exam — and each of them has to be granted to you, not picked off the table.
What you do not get is an exam in your own language. You arrange and pay for the interpreter yourself, outside the CBR rate, and what an interpreter translates is words. Legal categories are not translated: «bestuurder» stays exactly as broad or as narrow as the law made it, even after the word has been spoken in your language. An interpreter repairs your reading, not your concepts. Take this form if the language barrier genuinely blocks your way and it has been granted to you, and not as a substitute for learning the terms.
Extra time is not a language concession
Extra time is a separate provision and has nothing to do with language. Here too the exam runs 45 minutes. The surcharge is € 13.50. If you have a dyslexia certificate you claim that surcharge back within 14 days of the exam through Mijn CBR; miss the window and the money is gone.
The point to grasp is this: extra time gives you more minutes, not a different dictionary. A question you do not understand you will still not understand in the extra quarter of an hour. Time helps someone who knows the words and reads slowly; it does nothing for someone who is missing the words.
Why the concepts stay Dutch
The traffic rules live in the RVV 1990, and art. 1 of it is one long list of definitions. Those definitions are not a dictionary but a boundary line: they say who a rule covers and who it does not. The moment a question uses one of those words, it is testing the boundary, not the translation.
That is why every term in our glossary carries not only a translation but also the legal meaning and a field for what it gets confused with. The lesson on basic vocabulary walks through the whole vocabulary; below are the pairs that most often trip up candidates who came to Dutch from another language.
The word bridge: where translation gives out
bestuurder — weggebruiker
Art. 1 puts it briefly: bestuurders are «alle weggebruikers behalve voetgangers». Weggebruikers are «voetgangers, fietsers, bromfietsers, bestuurders van een gehandicaptenvoertuig, van een motorvoertuig of van een tram, ruiters, geleiders van rij- of trekdieren of vee en bestuurders van een bespannen of onbespannen wagen». The trap is the everyday translation «motorist»: a cyclist is a bestuurder too. If the article says «bestuurders», the rule also covers the cyclist beside you; if it says «weggebruikers», the pedestrian is included as well.
voertuig — motorvoertuig
According to art. 1, voertuigen are «fietsen, bromfietsen, gehandicaptenvoertuigen, motorvoertuigen, trams en wagens». Motorvoertuigen are «alle gemotoriseerde voertuigen behalve bromfietsen, fietsen met trapondersteuning en gehandicaptenvoertuigen, bestemd om anders dan langs rails te worden voortbewogen». Which of the two words stands in the article decides whether the bicycle falls inside or outside the rule. In any other language they sound almost the same; in the law they do not.
voorrang verlenen — voor laten gaan
Art. 1 defines voorrang verlenen as «het de betrokken bestuurders in staat stellen ongehinderd hun weg te vervolgen». It applies between drivers meeting at a junction, and it is set by signs, by haaientanden — art. 1 calls them «voorrangsdriehoeken op het wegdek» — or by the general rule. Voor laten gaan is something else: it is the duty of anyone performing a special manoeuvre, such as pulling away, reversing, turning around or changing lanes. Then you let all other traffic go first, cyclists and pedestrians included, whichever direction they come from. Two phrases, two moments; in translation they often collapse into one.
bromfiets — snorfiets
The bromfiets does 45 km per hour on the carriageway and carries a yellow plate; the snorfiets may not exceed 25 km per hour and carries a blue one. Art. 1 describes the snorfiets as a «bromfiets die blijkens de gegevens in het kentekenregister is geconstrueerd voor een maximumsnelheid die niet meer bedraagt dan 25 km per uur, met uitzondering van de speed-pedelec…». The dots are not decoration: what follows in the law is the exception, and it counts. The speed-pedelec — an electric bromfiets with pedal assistance that keeps pulling above that speed — is therefore not a snorfiets. These are two categories with their own speed and their own place on the road, not one vehicle at two speeds.
rijbaan — rijstrook
The rijbaan is, in art. 1, «elk voor rijdende voertuigen bestemd weggedeelte met uitzondering van de fietspaden en de fiets/bromfietspaden»: everything that is driven on except the cycle paths and the cycle/moped paths — a cycle path is not part of the rijbaan. The rijstrook is «door doorgetrokken of onderbroken strepen gemarkeerd gedeelte van de rijbaan van zodanige breedte dat bestuurders van motorvoertuigen op meer dan twee wielen daarvan gebruik kunnen maken»: a lane exists only where lines are painted, and it is wide enough for a car. On a road without markings there are no lanes in the sense of the law at all. A question about leaving the rijbaan is therefore about something other than a question about changing rijstrook, and the difference is a single syllable. Confuse the words and you will answer the wrong question correctly.
stilstaan — parkeren
Stilstaan is bringing the car to a stop, even for a moment. Parkeren is, in art. 1, «het laten stilstaan van een voertuig anders dan gedurende de tijd die nodig is voor en gebruikt wordt tot het onmiddellijk in- of uitstappen van passagiers of voor het onmiddellijk laden of lossen van goederen»: standing still for longer than the immediate getting in or out and loading or unloading requires. Everything hangs on that word «onmiddellijk», immediately: while the passenger is getting in or the goods are being carried, you are stilstaan; wait for anything else and you are parkeren. Prohibition signs and rules sometimes address one and sometimes the other, and a place where you may not park is not automatically a place where you may not stop. Keeping these two words apart is worth more marks in the exam than any single rule.
kruispunt — uitrit
A kruispunt is, in art. 1, a «kruising of splitsing van wegen»: roads that cross or that fork; priority applies there. A uitrit is the place where you drive onto the road from a property or yard; there you are performing a manoeuvre and must let the other traffic go first. In a picture they resemble each other — a side road and a driveway look nearly identical from above — and part of the question bank is built on exactly that.
verkeersteken — aanwijzing
A verkeersteken is the umbrella word for signs, traffic lights and markings on the road surface together. An aanwijzing comes from a person: a police officer or a traffic controller. The order of precedence is in art. 84 and reads in full: «Aanwijzingen gaan boven verkeerstekens en verkeersregels.» A question that puts these two words side by side is not asking about courtesy but about that order.
How the exam question is built
The question is not a block of text beside a picture: in all five official sample questions we worked through, the wording sits inside the image. The exam is visual by nature, and the language you pick is the language of a short sentence in the middle of a picture. The number of answers is not always four: in one of those five there are two. Our own bank runs from two to four — the schema was changed to match. There are questions where more than one answer is right and only the full set counts, questions where you type in a number, and short silent animations where you say what happens next. The complete list of question forms is in how the exam works.
For the language decision this means two things. First, the sentence you have to read is short, and short sentences forgive no half-understood word. Second, a misread term changes your answer without your noticing: the question still looks plausible, it is simply about something else.
Practising the exam language in our trainer
You do not train reading at exam speed by going through the theory once more in your own language. There is a separate mode on the exam page for that: exam language practice. It gives you 10 questions per round, with the question in the exam language and the explanation after your answer in the language of the site. That trains exactly what you will read in the exam, without losing the support of your own language in the explanation.
You choose the language of the question yourself: it stands on English by default, with Dutch one click away. The mode sits in the page address, so you can bookmark the exercise or send it on. Both modes belong to the exam section of the site and open as soon as you have access.
One more detail that is really about language. A single mock exam here contains no more than 2 questions with a number entry, because the real exam has only a few of them. In such a question the answer is a number rather than a word, and we accept the usual ways of writing it: «30», «30 km/u» and «30 kilometer per uur». Spelling in a foreign language is never marked here as a knowledge error. Individual topics are trained further in the practice section, and a full round in the mock exam.
How to choose
Compare not the languages but yourself in two situations. Read any question from our bank in Dutch and the same one in English, both against the clock. If you notice yourself re-reading in one language and not in the other, the choice is already made and it costs you the surcharge at most.
Choose Dutch if you understand the question without going back over it: it is the cheapest rate and the concepts are there in their own language. Choose English if your English is noticeably stronger; the surcharge is small next to a second attempt. Choose the interpreter or the individually supervised form only if reading itself is the problem and that form has been granted to you, and know that you arrange and pay the interpreter separately. And in all three cases learn the Dutch terms: they are not switched off in any of the variants.
What to remember
- The exam exists in Dutch and in English; Russian and Ukrainian do not exist as exam languages.
- The language changes the wording of the question, not the material, not the time and not the pass mark.
- English removes the reading barrier, not the Dutch concepts: bromfiets and snorfiets differ in English only by the qualifier — «moped» and «light moped».
- The rate with an interpreter or individual supervision is a full rate, not a surcharge, and you pay the interpreter separately.
- Extra time is not a language concession; with a dyslexia certificate you claim the surcharge back through Mijn CBR.
- The law defines its own words in art. 1: bestuurder, weggebruiker, voertuig, motorvoertuig, voorrang verlenen. Learn them in Dutch, with the meaning attached.
- Train reading at exam speed in the language mode, not in your own language.
Where these figures come from
- CBR rates 2026 — every amount in this lesson.
- The CBR's shape of the category B theory exam — number of questions, time, pass mark, the longer slot with extra time, an interpreter or individual supervision, and the question forms from the official sample questions.
- RVV 1990, art. 1 and art. 84 — the definitions quoted here and the order of precedence, taken word for word.
- Our term cards — the meaning of each term in each language and the field for what it gets confused with.
- Our trainer's exam rules — the figures that describe only our own practice environment.