Learning Danish

In an effort to meet my fellow exchange students and seem less like a tourist when I'm out and about, I took a week-long "Danish Crash Course" offered by my host university, CBS. The course covered basic Danish language skills and Danish culture. This course was a big challenge for me. I've never had much of a knack for learning new languages. I took Spanish in school from Kindergarten to 10th grade and I am still not fluent in Spanish. 

Danish is a difficult language compared to English, for sure. Not only does the Danish alphabet have 3 additional vowels, the vowels I am familiar with are pronounced differently! Danish pretty much turns everything upside down for me. These strange new vowels leave me tongue tied. 

The additional vowels in the Danish alphabet

To make matters worse, because Danish is a historic language and not a phonetic language, words are pronounced completely differently from how they are spelled. I realized this within minutes of being in Denmark. My new neighborhood, Amager, is pronounced simply as "Ama". 

When attempting to learn Danish, it seems like most of the letters in Danish words are not even pronounced. You basically have to memorize the correct pronunciation because when you see words spelled out on the page it's impossible to just sound them out using the alphabet. When saying a phrase in Danish, the words flow together and the phrase becomes one big sound, not a sequence of sounds. 

Luckily, my Danish teacher Mike is a laid-back dude who wears shark tooth necklaces and told us dirty jokes during class. He was understanding of our struggle with the language and gave us great advice such as how to avoid having our bicycles stolen and where to find good cinnamon rolls. I'm still too embarrassed by my poor pronunciation to converse with Danes in Danish. But I've managed to use the Danish word for thank you, "Tak". Baby steps.