"Hoewel hij oud is, is de man sterk."

You should use this website as a reference too: http://www.dutchgrammar.com/en/?n=WordOrder.00

The (relatively) simple case is when the main clause comes before the subordinate clause:

• De man is sterk, hoewel hij oud is.

But if the subordinate clause comes before the main clause, the main clause gets the same word order as in questions:

• Is de man sterk?
• Hoewel hij oud is, is de man sterk.

There are three types of word order in Dutch. I will explain them with the example De man leest het boek because then I can refer to het boek as the object. (Oud and sterk are not objects, though they are in similar positions.)

• [omdat] de man het boek leest. (SOV)

This is the original Proto-Germanic default word order that is familiar to some of us from Latin. (Both Proto-Germanic and Latin had very free word order because the cases prevented ambiguity. But SOV was the word order that speakers produced in ordinary sentences when they didn't want to stress anything in particular.) The verb comes last. In Dutch it is preserved in most but not all subordinate clauses, e.g. in those that are introduced by omdat (because). The Michel Thomas Dutch course refers to this word order as the omdat effect.

• De man leest het boek. (SVO, V2)

This is the normal word order for main clauses. The verb comes second. Instead of the subject (de man) you can also put other parts of the sentence first, e.g. the object (het boek), to stress them. But even then the verb always comes second: Het boek leest de man. This is why this word order type is called V2. The only exception is that if you put the verb first in order to stress it, you obviously don't repeat it in second position. So the result is VSO word order, not VVSO.

When the predicate is more complicated than a single verb (e.g. heeft gelezen rather than just leest), only the main verb is in second position and the remainder of the predicate follows at the end of the sentence: De man heeft het boek gelezen. So Dutch (like German) is not really V2 in main clauses but actually a weird mixture of V2 and SOV.

• Leest de man het boek? (VSO)

This is the normal word order for main clauses of questions without a question word such as why, where etc. You can think of it as a special case of the previous one: If there is a question word, we obviously want to stress it, so we put it first. If not, we usually want to stress the verb, so we put the verb first.

It is also the normal word order for main clauses that are preceded by a subordinate clause.

If the predicate is more complicated than a single verb, the same complication as for Dutch V2 clauses occurs: Heeft de man het boek gelezen?

I think it's just because the verb goes second, so you have subordinate clause + verb and then the rest. If you didn't want the subject after the verb, you'd have to put the main clause first. But I don't know for sure, so don't take my word for it.

Not the same, but similar. 'hoewel' is pronounced /'ɦu'wɛl/ whereas 'hoeveel' is pronounced /ɦuˈveːl/

V is pronounced as an F and W is pronounced as a V (using English or Spanish as a reference) :)

It does seem odd...I thought it was a pretty universal thing (in 'proper' speech, at least) to define the pronoun before you use it (unless it's an undefinable one, like in fixed phrases--'het regent.')

English allows constructions like this. When a pronoun that references an object precedes it instead of following it as usual, it's called a cataphoric pronoun, or cataphora (as opposed to anaphora, which follow their co-referents). This sentence means that cataphora are at the very least tolerated to some extent in Dutch. Other languages may dissallow them completely.

This link should help explain, you might have to copy and paste it into your address bar to work: http://www.unilang.org/course.php?res=62subid=2#ci-l7conjunctions :)

Actually because the link is so temperamental, I'll screen cap it:

From the link I provided.

It has the same meaning, but is a pretty loose translation because you moved man from the main clause to the subordinate clause. If someone had come up with it before and reported it as a variant, I guess it would be accepted by now - though I can't really see a reason for this transformation.

Even though means exactly the same as even if. So yes.

It is correct, but the contraction "man's" for "man is" is not used very often. Presumably, nobody has suggested it yet.

Yes. While can be used in the sense of even though, whereas. This phenomenon exists in many languages: Dutch terwijl, German während, French pendant que, ... They all have a primary temporal meaning, and a secondary meaning as even though.

Because of the incorrect word order, that's not a full English sentence - except perhaps a rather odd one. Correct: "Although he is old, the man is strong."

In Dutch, the word order of the main clause changes to question word order when it is preceded by a subordinate clause. In English this is not the case. Therefore, when just looking at the English sentence, we can safely drop the subordinate clause, getting (in your case): "Is the strong man."

The most fundamental problem is that you replaced predicative use of the adjective sterk/strong (the man is strong), which claims a property, into attributive use (the strong man), which assumes it. The second problem is that you gave it the word order of a question, even though you didn't put the question mark. And the third problem is that even after adding the question mark it's quite an odd sentence:

• Is the strong man? I.e., does the strong man exist?

This has nothing to do with the meaning of the Dutch sentence. What is odd about this sentence is that it uses the copula is without a complement. When you here this kind of question you would normally answer: "What do you mean? Is the strong man what? What did you mean to say: Is the strong man here? Is the strong man old? Please complete your sentence!"

If we correct attributive use to predicative use, then this is what we get:

• Is the man strong?

It's still a question, but much closer in meaning to the Dutch sentence. Finally, we have to turn it from a question into a statement:

• The man is strong.

Now, adding the subordinate clause again, we get the correct full sentence from my first paragraph: "Although he is old, the man is strong."