4 Tips to Learn Danish Quickly

Danish is an extremely difficult language to learn.  However, it turns out that there are a few factors that can greatly improve your chances of learning it before other people.  Today, I give you a few of those factors.

1.  Have a Danish boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse.  Your Danish teacher may very well assume that you have one, and therefore some of the homework that you are assigned will involve talking to said significant other.  For those who do not have a Danish significant other, see option number 2.

2.  Regularly go to a job where most of your colleagues are Danish and will happily be patient with you while you struggle to express yourself in Danish without switching to English, despite the fact that speaking English is far easier for both of you than speaking Danish together might be.

3.  Be a highly logical person who already has a fairly firm understanding of grammar rules.  Learning Danish will test the grammar skills of even the most literate of native English speakers.  If you don't already have a basic understanding of grammar, learning Danish will teach you more about the structure of the English language than you ever thought you needed to know.

And finally...

4.  Already speak either German, Dutch, Swedish, or Norwegian.  There are a few classmates of mine who, from early on in our Danish classes, were able to understand most of what the Danes said.  At first, I found this extraordinarily frustrating.  What was I doing wrong that I just didn't know what all of these words meant, even if I could understand what words were being said (which is a challenge unto itself, especially early on)?  Turns out, the only thing I was doing wrong was not knowing one of the aforementioned languages.  Enough of the words in those 4 languages (and possibly a few that I've forgotten) are similar enough to words in Danish that it's entirely possible to understand Danish very quickly.

Those who are lucky enough to fit into 2 or 3 of these factors will find themselves racing ahead of the others in their class.

As for me?  The only category that I even vaguely fit into is #3.  In most cases, I'm able to understand and remember the grammar rules easily enough.  Unfortunately, it's the words that I have a tough time remembering.

There's very little that one can do with even a perfect understanding of Danish grammar if they can't remember any of the words.

Studieskolen - Module 3.1, Words, Words, Words

I'm a little over two weeks into module 3 now.

So far, so... okay.

I'm still following along well enough, but I still have a tough time deciphering our younger teacher's accent.

The good news is, from what I can tell, we've basically learned all of the major grammatical rules.  It seems that module 3 focuses more on expanding our vocabulary and solidifying the grammar rules that we've learned.  And the latter is certainly working for me.  Rules that I'd learned in module 2 but had always had a tough time remembering seem to be making more sense to me now.  And I'm glad to be finally learning more words.

Danish is a much more compact language than English.  While some sources claim that English has over 1 million words, Danish has 150,000 at the most.  I think one major difference is that English has a lot more words that are obsolete, while Danish uses a far higher percentage of its words on a regular basis.

Pronunciation is still a bit of an issue for all of us in the class.  We can all understand each other fairly well, but Danes (our younger teacher specifically) seems to have a tough time understanding us some of the time.  Danish is not a language spoken by foreigners very often, so Danes often have a hard time understanding the language when it's spoken with any kind of accent, no matter how subtle.

There are some words in Danish, though, that make a lot of sense and should be considered for stealing by the English language.  For example, the Danish word for "mother" is "mor" and the word for "father" is "far."  Simple enough.  And then they take it a step further with grandparents.  Your mother's mother? "Mormor."  Mother's father? "Morfar."  And of course, "farfar" and "farmor."  It makes so much sense, and saves time from having to clarify if you're talking about your "maternal grandmother" or "paternal grandmother."

On an unrelated note, this is the Facebook page for the Copenhagen Rugby League Football Club.  "Like" it!