On Learning Danish

Learning Danish poses a real challenge

What is madness? That's when you start thinking that Danish is a pretty language that you get tempted to learn it. That sounds mad, right? But that's what's come over me lately. Yesterday I checked my all time favourite language-learning resources online and successfully got me a few files on learning Danish, both audio and e-books. And one can download them for free, niiiiice. When I was at high school I used to teach myself Norwegian, and I've been pretty much informed ever since that written language of Norwegian is more or less identical to that of Danish for a historical reason. So having prior knowledge of Norwegian is clearly an advantage. 


I've only little problem with written Danish, but one thing that one needs to tackle is the pronunciation. Yep, Danish is known for their magical way of speaking. Some say they speak as if they were drunk. Their fondness of reducing sounds is remarkable. In fact Danish has at least nine vowels and it is said the richer a language in vowels, the more complicated one has to pronounce it. Well if you still don't get what I just wrote just think languages like French or Chinese. Having learnt French for a good nine months at a language school, not to mention some attempts I had made on my own beforehand, I can reassure you that Danish tastes much creamier, more fluid than the infamous French. Even it's said jokingly that Danish consonants are spoken as vowels by Danes. Overall I do believe that there's something attractive about this less popular foreign language that seems irresistable. The Danes' ability to even include muscle throat as a part of their resonance organ is plausible, and laughable at the same time.

Along with Swedish and Norwegian, Danish has its origin in Old Norse as the parent language. Over the time languages do evolve, they split from each other, get branched-off to become their recent form, modern version. For me learning language means looking back to the past, to the history of humankind. Each words listed in dictionary is a piece of history, we might never know how ancient they are, we may not know if they're actually connected to those of other languages. One thing for sure languages are living proof of our unthinkable evolutionary journey as the dwellers of the Earth. They mark our existence as a human being.

Further readings:

1, 2, 3

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