We were out to dinner last night, and I told my fiance that I was going to start pointing at random things and asking how to say them in Danish. He was on board, so I started by pointing at my glass.
Sort of an easy one. "Glass" in Danish is "glas."
But he then asked if I knew how to say "a glass" ("et glas" in Danish). This lead to a discussion about grammar and whether it's important to learn a language's grammar first, or its vocabulary. He asserted that it is more important to understand the grammar of a language first, and then pick up the vocabulary later.
Part of me wants to disagree. If I knew every word there was to know in Danish, and I knew the grammar rules of the English language, I could probably speak Danish relatively well. Sure, my sentence structure would make the Danes laugh, but at least they would mostly understand me, and likely correct my grammar.
What I actually think, though, is that the two need to be learned simultaneously. It's really not a chicken or egg situation at all.
False advertising. Sorry.
the problem with learning danish grammar before vocabulary (or vice versa) is that the danish language has a serious lack of hard and fast rules when it comes to grammar. like when you make a word plural, you either add -e, -er, -r to the root or if its irregular you just leave it alone but there's no rule to help you figure out how it works. take the "glas" for example. its "et glas, glasset, flere glas, glassene" if you didn't just know that it was irregular and tried to put it in plural form in one of the standard ways by adding an r or an er it would come out sounding like glasur and then people would probably think you were talking about frosting instead of more than one glass.
ReplyDeleteif you haven't already bookmarked it, den danske ordbog (http://ordnet.dk/ddo/) is a great help if you have a word and want to figure out the "bøjning" :)
sorry for the mini grammar lesson. I just followed you over here from foreigners in denmark and had to comment. :)
Hei,
ReplyDeleteI saw your post at Americans in DK fb group. Please aware that the 2 year rule Stephanie Kinch mentioned isn't true. Anyone could start (free) education right away, I did.