Informal Formal Danish Class #5 - I Didn't Cry!

...Much...

We arrived at the class a few minutes early, and I took the time to be as honest as possible with the instructor.  "I'll be honest," I said. "I haven't even looked at this stuff in two weeks."

Sometimes life just gets in the way.

And this made for an extraordinarily taxing first half of the class.  We started by trying to invert sentences.  Where we can say either "I went to the store yesterday" or "Yesterday, I went to the store," in Danish the sentence structure looks more like "Yesterday went I to the store."

That's all well and good.  I have a decent understanding of that grammatical rule.  What I don't have is the vocabulary committed to memory yet.  So, while I should be able to build a sentence well enough, I don't have the words with which to do so.

It made for a very frustrating first hour or so.

After that, though, we worked on an exercise where we tried to determine which vowel sounds we were hearing when the instructor pronounced various words.

And we were all equally awful at that, so I felt much better.

Why do you hate consonants?

That's right, I said it.  The Danes hate consonants.  So many are softened to the point of being unrecognizable or just forgotten altogether that it's making me feel like I'm speaking like a drunk.

And not only do they hate consonants, but they love vowels so much that they have nine of them.  I'm still working on remembering the new ones, and trying to hear the differences between the long and short vowels... which generally sound the same to me.

I will say this, though... Language learning books for adults are much more realistic.  For example, in the first conversation in lesson #2, Hans tells George (who has just arrived from England), "Du trænger til en gin og tonic, George. Det gør vi alle tre."

Translation?  Well, of course he's saying "You need a gin and tonic, George. All three of us do."

Amen to that Hans.  Amen to that.