SO YOU WANT TO LEARN DANISH?
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Originally posted from a bedroom in Denmark back in February 2016, this Danish language learning advice has been re-checked by the writer in the 2020s from a living room in Canada and, according to him, it is all still very “meget godt” and “tommel op”.--
OK, before we dive into the fairly niche topic of 'Wanting To Learn Danish', I think it is important to mention a couple relevant pieces of information first:
Firstly, I first sat down at the Danish learning table as an “I’m sorry… I know it's a little lazy and ignorant of me, BUT, I've only ever bothered learning how to communicate in English so far in my life” man of 30+ years (and counting). In other words, the part of my brain that would normally be used to learn & comprehend a new language has long since grown over with weeds.
Secondly, at the time of me writing this, I have only been attempting to learn Danish for a few months. Which is another way of me saying, "I still can’t actually speak Danish very well. In fact, you might say that I still can’t speak it at all." In other words, you are literally about to read advice on how to learn Danish from a guy that has not managed to learn all that much Danish. Proceed accordingly.
Alright, and now that we’ve appropriately lowered your expectations down to a level I feel more comfortable speaking from, here are my top 5 pearls of learned wisdom for anyone else that is thinking of maybe trying to start learning themselves some Danish.
#1 - THE PRONUNCIATION IS TOTALLY F*CKED
There is no getting around this fact. It seems, for some dumb reason, way back in Denmark’s early days, they must have let someone with an apparent speech impediment decide how the language would be spoken… and then everyone just went along with it. I'm sure if the Danes could go back in time, they'd probably reconsider putting a Viking with pronunciation problems in charge of pronunciation. Although, to be fair, I’m sure everyone was just drunk on øl… I mean, just look at how their ‘ABC song’ must sound:
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As an english speaker first glancing at the Danish alphabet, you’ll probably start off being the most worried about 'The Three Letters What Don’t Exist In The English Alphabet'. These are also referred to less commonly as the “A Stuck To An E” (æ), the “O's Are Not Welcome Here” (ø) and “The Little O Jumped Over An A” (å). But, besides being the hardest letters to find on your english laptop, these three letters are not the ones you should be most concerned about.
True, when you first see a word like “rød”, your initial reaction will be “what the feck is that in the middle?!”, but it won't be too far into your adventures in learning Danish that you discover it’s the common looking letters like their “d”, and the bastardized way the Danes sometimes say it, that will cause you the most social anxiety when it’s your turn to read/speak out loud.
For example, to me and my ears, a Danish "d" often sounds like the “l” sound in “fell”, except the pronunciation is a little trickier (also, sometimes a "d" sounds like how you'd expect a "d" to sound like, because… sure, why not?). What I try to do when I see a “d” a the end of word, and what seems to help get me the closest to sounding like a real Dane, is to say “el” like an English person saying "El Niño", except I imagine that a small person has punched my tongue and grabbed the "Niño" before I can even finish fully pronouncing the “el” all the way. This often leads to me looking like I just vomited my tongue a bit when I try to say things like “rød”… but it also leads to Danish people going “wow, nice pronunciation”.
Here's some videos to help better prepare you for the really hard time you are about to have with Danish pronunciation:
#2 - IF YOUR LEARNING MATERIALS ARE NOT AUDIO + TEXT, YOUR LEARNING MATERIALS ARE KINDA USELESS
This is probably true when learning all languages, but it is especially true with Danish. So, if you find some learning materials that do not come with audio, or audio that does not come with text to reference, you gotta keep looking for better learning materials. Because Danish words do not sound like you think they read and Danish words do not spell like you think they sound (and if you go too far down either of those roads, you’re gonna come out the other end somehow even stupider in Danish).
Unfortunately, finding Danish learning materials can be quite difficult outside of Denmark, as Danish is not one of those sexy languages from more populated countries like French or Spanish or German (just kidding, German is not sexy sounding… but there is a lot of learning materials for it). Sometimes it can feel like pretty slim pickings when trying to learn how to speak-a the dansk. I can personally vouch for having many failed attempts at even getting over the first hump of learning Danish because I couldn’t find any good source material at my local library / bookstores.
Thanks to the internet, however, I eventually came across Memrise. It’s free. and you can find courses with pronunciation + text (again, Danish is not sexy, so there are a lot less options than more popular languages… but there are some). And Memrise's approach to learning the material seems really good — at least for me and my dumb brain.
But if you start doing 15 minutes a day on Memrise, I promise that pretty soon you’ll start thinking that maybe you’re at a point where you can also write a blog post to advise other people on how to learn a language that you haven’t actually learned yet.
Eventually, you're going to need to expand your learning materials, as Memrise mostly helps you learn words by repetition but it doesn't really break down any grammar rules, so it’s more of a great starting point. But if you want to learn when to use "en" and when to use "et" in front of a word, you'll need to look elsewhere (and then after you look elsewhere you'll learn that there isn't really any set rule for when you use either because WHY WOULD THERE BE ANY LOGIC TO THIS BLOODY LANGUAGE?!).
But Memrise will get you to the point where you can start to naively think that you’re ready to move on to more text heavy materials and maybe actually make sense of them. And that’s something that’s more than nothing.
#3 - LEARN THE 100 MOST COMMON WORDS & BASIC GRAMMAR RULES
There is a Tim Ferris blog post about how the key to becoming conversation fluent in any language in just a short while is to focus in on learning the 100 most common words. And he has another post about how translating just a few simple sentence into the language you want to learn, you can unlock that language's basic grammar rules and be well on your way.
Now, I can’t say that this was my approach and it totally worked (or that I’m even much of a fan of Tim ‘a life is meant to be hacked’ Ferris), BUT… I do think it is a pretty useful concept to tell yourself when you are just getting started. Because the early learning days can get quite discouraging, so being able to think to yourself “I just need to learn 100 words and translate a few sentences?! A monkey that knows how to use Google Translate could do that!” really helps keep you motivated.
Also, when finding the above Tim Ferris links I noticed that he has since posted some more “hey… learning languages can be way easier than you think" posts, so if you want to build up your pre-learning confidence maybe have a read of 'How to Learn Any Language in Record Time and Never Forget It' and '12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time — The Only Post You’ll Ever Need'. Because Danish is hard, so any tricks or false belief in the easiness of the task ahead that you can find is helpful (and that’s the appeal of consuming all these life hack hacks, right?).
#4 - WANT TO FEEL LIKE A KID AGAIN?
Learning a new language is a great way to re-live how it feels to be a little kid again. Well, maybe not re-experiencing that blissful brand of childlike wonder (I think we’ve all been far too corrupted by now for getting another go at experiencing that feeling again) —BUT — it is still possible for you to have grown adults give you applause for doing tasks usually reserved for toddlers, and that can feel quite childlike. For example, when is the last time other adults made you feel like you impressed them for counting to ten (also known as “ti” in Danish) or for naming (almost) all of the things on the dinner table?
“Det er en talklerken!” you’ll say as they point at a plate. And when you confidently say “Det er en ske!” when they hold up a spoon, they will damn near drop that spoon, along with their jaws, and begin banging their palms together for you. And you know what? They won’t even think you’re an idiot when you can’t remember what butter is called, because, hey, you’re just a little foreign kid now. And little foreign kids are cute because they mispronounce the darnedest things (and they often get served first when the dessert comes out, so swallow that pride and wash it down with something cream based).
Eventually, most will tire of testing your low level language skills after a few rounds (because, let's be honest, it's not actually that impressive — especially since almost everyone in Denmark can speak English fluently), BUT, if you start feeling over 'Small Child Trivia Night' before your hosts do, a good sentence to learn to say is “Kan du stave det?". This means "Can you spell that?", which, after the 4th or 5th time you say it to someone trying to test your abilities, it should eventually put off even the most keen amateur Danish teacher.
And if you have a real keener on your hands, follow every one of their "do you know how to say this?" questions with another question: “Kan du skrive det ned?", which is "Can you write that down?". I promise, they will eventually leave you to your rye bread in peace soon enough.
#5 - DANISH AND ENGLISH ARE MORE SIMILAR THAN YOU THINK
Despite your initial thoughts when first hearing it being spoke, Danish and English actually have many similarities. A lot of words are super similar and some words are even spelt exactly the same. This all makes a lot of sense once you remember that Danish Vikings were pillaging it up in the UK many years ago, so of course there is going to be some crossover. However, there is not so much crossover that things become super easy, there is just enough that it gives you a little hope in knowing that learning Danish is not as “I might as well be learning Chinese" as you originally thought it would be.
But, be warned: as you progress and start mastering certain words and grammar, you can't just directly translate things from English to Danish. Sometimes the Danes like to put words in a weird order, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes you think you've grasped the proper structure and all the words that should make up the sentence you're about to say, and then it will turn out that the Danes “just don't say it like that" or "in this certain situation, and for reasons that cannot be explained, you'd actually say something completely different than what you have logically attempted".
Also, just because something is an expression where you are from, and just because you know the individual words to now say that expression in Danish… that doesn't mean it works over in Denmark. Although, that hasn't stopped me from telling people to “sparke sten" ("kick rocks") and I don’t think it should stop you either. Because that’s how languages evolve.
And on that note, I think that is more or less all the ‘Getting Started Learning Danish’ wisdom that I can pass on from my first 3 months of attempting to learn Danish in my free time while hanging out at my missus’ childhood home in Svendborg. So I will now leave you with a helpful quote from the comments section of this 'The very rough guide to Danish' article:
"No Englishman could speak this language adequately unless he were drunk and had no roof to his mouth"
And with drinking alcohol now revealed as a vital part of my educational tool kit, I best get back to trying to master that Danish language, so I leave with their most cherished word… skål!
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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI
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