speakdanish.dk

My wife has a Japanese friend who studied Danish at the University of Tokyo, and then came to Denmark to study the Danish education system. Most Danes don’t see any point in anyone taking such an abstract interest in their language. It would be understandable if she came here on holiday and then got hooked on the rye bread, liver paté and fluorescent sausages. Then she’d have to stay and learn the language, like the rest of us.

Textbook cases

The Danish experience in Tokyo

She’s been travelling back and forth between Denmark and Japan for many years. While she was learning, and as her Danish improved, she became increasingly aware of how badly her Japanese lecturers spoke Danish. And this is not surprising, because they themselves learned Danish from textbooks.

If you’ve already started to learn Danish, you might know what a challenge this is. When I arrived in Denmark, I tried to study every day. I read grammar books from cover to cover. I knew how the language worked and what it looked like, but after six months I was still unable to say a word. Not only that; I was unable to decipher what people said to me when they spoke Danish.

My Danish mother-in-law once asked me something, and I wanted to say måske (maybe). I knew the word, I saw it in my mind, but because I had no idea how to say it, I just sat there and slowly transformed into a drunken lemur on the verge of going catatonic.

Just give me a bloody beer
Learning Danish can be a scary experience for all concerned. I mention in the introduction to Danish pronunciation that Danish does not tolerate deviations very well. Unlike English, that is spoken in all kinds of dialects and accents all over the world, Danish is very particular about how it is pronounced.

In a diabolical twist, the Danish word for beer happens to be unpronounceable. On a particularly hot summer’s day at the beach, I tried to buy a beer at the kiosk. One might think that “øl” should be easy for anyone to decipher, no matter how much it gets mangled. After 5 attempts, in varying tones, pitches and modulations of voice, having nearly strangled myself with my own tongue, it was starting to get embarrassing for everyone. And I was getting annoyed because this was happening so often. Since then I started asking for a “Carlsberg” instead.

Social learning
I understand my fellow foreigners better than Danes do when they speak Danish. It doesn’t matter that someone speaks with a Farsi or a Spanish accent, foreigners usually know what other foreigners are saying in Danish before a Dane can decipher it. For this reason I think that much of the success of language schools lies in the opportunity for learners to interact in Danish among themselves.

A foreigner speaking Danish enunciates his words distinctly, perhaps not necessarily in a way that native speakers can understand, but for anyone learning Danish it is manna from heaven. I would even go so far as to say (and this is probably heresy in the ears of Danish pedagogues everywhere), that second-language speakers make better language teachers than native speakers do.

If you’ve just arrived in Denmark and you want to learn Danish, I suggest you try to find or establish a social group. You can get together at someone’s place a few times a week and speak Danish to each other. The advantage of learning with your peers is that you share your learning experience. It gives you the opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes and to generally facilitate your cultural transition.

I like to emphasize this, because living in Denmark especially can be a very alienating experience. It is important not only for your social health, but also for your mental health, that you learn Danish in an environment of your peers. You will probably attend a language school at some point, but it can take many months before that happens.

A few tips
When I learned to speak English, I found that the best method was to read aloud to myself, and I find that it also works well when learning Danish. It allows more automatic language response when you need it, because your mouth is actually involved in the learning; you are not just silently internalizing the rules. With half an hour a day of reading aloud, you should be a fairly confident speaker within a matter of months.

My course encourages you to repeat what you hear, which I consider effective because speaking Danish is as hard as hearing it. The most challenging thing about listening to Danish (or any other language), is that you won’t be able to discern words in a sentence. As far as you can hear, it is just one long string of sounds.

Luckily, Danes tend to use quite a few stock sentences in everyday communication. I spent many years collecting these sentences (they are all in the course), so instead of trying to listen to individual words, you can study sentences and store them in your brain as whole units of information. In many cases you needn’t even know exactly what the sentence is when you you hear it; if you’ve heard it often enough you can usually guess it just from the intonation.

Here are a few more tips, from personal experience:
1. Take one thing at a time. You will want to know everything at once. Don’t frustrate yourself.

2. Don’t get angry. The Danish language has been like this for hundreds of years. The Danes around you have nothing to do with it. It takes centuries of unbridled beer consumption to evolve such an impossible-to-pronounce language.

3. Be spontaneous. Even if you say something stupid and people laugh at you, their laughter is almost never derisive.

4. This might sound obvious, but if you speak English only, you might have the impression that everything in the world has an English bias. Learning a new language will prove you so wrong that it might be painful at times. (This is based on what I’ve seen from other monolingual people trying to learn a new language).

5. Your learning curve is an up-and-down cycle. Some days you’ll feel dense. You can’t learn a thing, and your Danish sounds terrible. Other days you’ll be on a roll. I ascribe it to the mysteries of the brain.

6. Watch a lot of Danish TV. You’ll be surprised how much you learn from reading the subtitles.

7. Make an effort to learn the grammar. It might put a bit of a damper on your spontaneity, but you can’t truly play the blues if you don’t know the chords.

8. Think of it as a daily excursion out of your comfort zone. It can only be good for you.

Interview with Nicole Stokes DuPass, an American sociologist from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a guest researcher at the Danish National Centre for Social Research in Copenhagen.

See more interviews at foreignersindenmark.

I’ve briefly touched on this topic in previous posts, but it warrants a hearing of its own because it is an aspect of Danish culture that is probably going to make the most initial impact on you.

Happiest people?
I spoke with a Danish woman recently who was so annoyed with her mother’s overbearing and intrusive behaviour, that she seriously considered breaking all ties with her. In other contexts this might be considered a joke, and this is how I perceived it at first, but in Denmark it is often a harsh reality.

Danish parents and children are almost always at loggerheads, and most of the time the struggle is about independence. Parents often find themselves struggling with the choice between helping their children and just letting them be. Children have been conditioned since birth to develop their own opinions about everything, and when parents try to give them advice they are sometimes spurned in the worst possible way. My friend’s case is not unique: it is not unusual for children to break all contact with their parents if they think they’ve interfered too much.

This sounds drastic, but Danes take their independence very seriously. It is part of what shapes their attitudes towards other people in general, and part of what makes them viewed as unapproachable by those who don’t know them. Foreigners talk about the Danes as being “cold”, but Danes just want to be left alone to do their own thing. They don’t want anyone to interfere in their carefully-crafted lives, and contempt is never so quickly bred as daring to get too familiar with a Dane.

However, it doesn’t take a major family feud for children to abandon their parents. In a society that values personal independence above all else, it is often just the natural outcome of things. Danes simply don’t prioritize their parents as, say, Italians do. Foreigners are often puzzled by how Danes can leave their elderly parents to fend off the ravages of oblivion, alone in their own homes, while the children themselves live just down the road, too busy living their own lives.

Denmark consistently ranks as the happiest country in the world, but for a country with such a special distinction, its people are among the loneliest. In fact, loneliness is the main reason for instances of suicide in Denmark. I would contend that Danes are perhaps more content with having their material needs met, but if suicide rates are anything to go by, it seems that people in the Caribbean and the Middle East are probably much less lonely.

Emotional support
Another salient consequence of this extreme individualism is a general lack of intimacy among Danes. Danes just don’t get too close to each other. It’s best to keep everyone at arm’s length.

Even among friends and family, emotional intimacy is always kept in check to a certain extent, and breaking down and spilling your guts is seen as a weakness by many. Families will disintegrate, friends will succumb to alcoholism and drug abuse, marriages will falter, but people will in most cases suffer in silence. Standing armies of psychologists have now assumed these functions of friends and loved ones, and daily focus on emotional health have come to occupy the slot between shopping for dinner and picking up the kids from kindergarten.

Land of paradoxes
Before I came to Denmark, I knew a group of Danes back home. One day I was visiting them, and they mentioned that someone called Henrik was arriving from Denmark. We went to pick him up at the airport. Everyone was speaking Danish to each other, so I wasn’t quite informed about the whole situation, but it took me a few days to figure out that Henrik was not part of the group. He was a complete stranger to everyone, and yet I got the distinct impression that everyone not only knew him, but that he was somehow related to one of the others. He simply integrated with the rest of the Danes, like a drop of water merging into a puddle.

Happy family

I remember how I envied being able to relate to others so easily, and I imagined what a big, happy family Denmark must be. I was attracted by the idea of egalitarianism and the implications it held for relationships among people in a greater society, how it can facilitate collective expressions of ordinary people’s wishes in a true democracy, how it can allow the individual to grow with others to attain his full potential, without fear and intimidation.

I foresaw endless scenarios of people realizing and expressing the full extents of their imagination. But in Denmark I found a paradoxical place, where such an environment exists, yet its imagination is held in check by an invisible power. The country’s character and essence is determined and defined simultaneously by a collective, consensus-driven will and an extreme individualism. People have a solid and intimate implicit understanding of each other, yet they choose to live in ways that isolate themselves from each other.

If you are not used to it, the aloofness and isolation that springs from this kind of individualism will seem unfortunate, and it will wrack your brain. But if you are going to live in Denmark, it will, for better or for worse, inevitably become part of your reality.

According to the old adage, travel broadens the mind. The mechanisms for this mind-broadening lie in the combination of the fact that we are all deeply cultural beings and that living in a strange land will grab you by the back of your neck and shake you out of everything you’ve ever imagined yourself to be.

You might have heard of culture shock before, but perhaps you hadn’t realized that it was a psychological phenomenon. Like grieving, which consists of multiple phases (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance), culture shock is a fairly well-defined process of adapting to your new cultural landscape.

The honeymoon
A new country is a new state of mind, and if you are naturally curious you will always be drawn to the exotic “other side”. The honeymoon phase is a fantastic wild ride of new impressions and ideas. You are in a constant state of suspended disbelief, wonder and beautiful ignorance, during which the newness of the world asserts itself with a fresh and different vigour.

Dreamy Denmark - land of greener pastures

Although this is typically a short-lived phase, your inability to understand the language perfectly for a year or two will essentially also blind you to many of the country’s hidden and harsher realities. The language might seem like a magical shroud that conceals a yet-to-be-discovered world of wonder, but the deeper you navigate into its stark wilderness, the more eerily familiar and mundane your new surroundings will become. You will find that the Danes use their otherworldly and impenetrable language to talk about the exact same everyday things as the people in the village of your disconsolate youth that you’ve so fervently spurned in your search for new pastures.

Negotiation
Within a matter of weeks the annoyances begin to creep up on you. People are not doing things the way you are used to. The little idiosyncrasies and differences used to be charming, but now they’re getting on your nerves. You feel disorientated, confused, angry, out of your depth. Why do they have to be so damn rigid about everything? Why does the language have to be so damn hard? Illogical and abstract as it may sound, you will blame every Dane you meet for their crazy language.

You will always find something to complain about, even after having lived in Denmark for years, and this phase is when much of it will begin to dawn on you.

You might at this point feel a certain calling. A great power has summoned you to be its emissary of truth, to convert the Danes from their evil ways. I’ll spare you a lot of trouble: The Danes don’t want to hear it. They don’t care. They’ve heard it all before.

The same goes for whatever ministry of foreigner affairs that you feel has treated you unfairly and whose outrageous injustices and inhumane policies should immediately be made international knowledge. Unless you plan on becoming a Danish politician in the near future and fighting the system from the inside (as politicians do), it is probably best to concentrate your energies on more pressing exigencies, like getting a job and learning Danish.

It is a good idea to find some other newly-arrived foreigners in Denmark. Establish a network. Your early networks will be strongest and will last for many years to come. You can get together and complain to each other all you like. Write a blog about your feelings, experiences and grievances and put it out there for all and sundry to read (but be sure to shroud it all in a thin veil of wry humour).

Acceptance
So, your crusade to change your host country to suit your needs hasn’t delivered the expected results. Welcome to Denmark! It will take a while, but much of it will begin to make sense, and the amalgamation of your previous and new world views will be an improvement over your old self.

Of course, not everyone manages to integrate equally well. Many sustain a lifelong trauma from culture shock, which not even re-immersion into the native culture can relieve.

Going home
In fact, re-immersion into your native culture is a bit of a cold comfort. At some point during your inner turmoils and tribulations you realize that “home” is a very fluid concept. You realize it most acutely when you go back home after a number of years in Denmark and discover how much of the Danish culture you’ve internalized. This is popularly known as “reverse culture shock”. The red pill has taken you deeper down the rabbit hole than you’d expected or ever imagined. Maybe a bit too deep, because now you emerged on the other side of the world, and everything is upside-down.

During my first visit to my beloved homeland after a few years’ absence, I became very annoyed with the everyday inefficiencies and random breakdowns in simple logic. Why don’t they have that separator thing in supermarkets, like the Danes have, that separate your groceries from other people’s on the checkout counter? Why do people queue in the post office when they can just take a number and wait wherever they like?

Being back home was nowhere near as exuberant and blissful an experience as I’d spent so many years making myself believe it would be. It was downright ordinary. My old friends had steadily been going on with their own lives, and were mostly too busy doing their own thing to be curious about what life in Denmark was like. Where is Denmark anyway? It gets cold there, doesn’t it? Have I ever seen a polar bear?

If there is one thing the average Dane would mention that makes him most proud of his heritage, it would probably be the Danish sense of fairness, justice and equality. Children are taught from a young age to treat others like they themselves would like to be treated. Parents and teachers are but links in a long chain of egalitarian tradition that has its roots in something called Janteloven, or the laws of Jante. It comes from a novel by a Danish/Norwegian writer, and its basic tenet is that you shouldn’t think too highly of yourself. You are part of a humble human collective, and if you try to fly too high, it is everyone else’s imperative to bring you down to earth by any means possible.

Take me to your leader
In the Danish workplace it is sometimes impossible to see who the boss is. I was often surprised by how often the real boss would be interrupted in his morning staff briefings by anyone and everyone who had an opinion about the matter. Rather than an elevated authority that boomed his message down to the masses, the boss seemed to be an aggregator of ideas, inconspicuously melding with the rest of the workforce. In matters that affected the group, his own opinions carried exactly as much weight as everyone else’s, but if he caught you dawdling, he was as much the butt-kicking, cigar-sucking boss you’d find in any other totalitarian and soul-crushing bulwark of human oppression around the world.

Because you are a free citizen, you are entitled to be treated as such. This means that you cannot be exploited economically. You have a right to work for a decent wage. Jobs that are disparaged by the rich (and the poor) in other countries, like garbage collecting, sweeping the streets and cleaning toilets are as respectable as being a doctor, engineer or a teacher (wait, scrap that last one).

Waiters are not tipped, because they actually get paid by their employers (the food is expensive enough to have included a tip anyway). And the Skattefar, or tax daddy, makes sure that he takes enough money from you so you are well shielded from any delusions of grandeur you might sustain from your toilet-cleaning job.

Counting old people’s teeth
Attitudes towards children are similarly egalitarian: children are in many ways equal to adults, only smaller. Danes don’t have honorary appellatives like Mr, Mrs, Ms or even Doctor and Professor. They do exist, but mostly only in parodic contexts. Children call adults by their first names, and adults likewise treat children like intelligent individuals.

Many years ago, at the dinner table, the topic of homosexuality came up. There was a young girl of about 7 or 8 present. She asked what a homosexual was. Her mother told her, and then continued with the conversation. My own parents would’ve suffered mild seizures, then agonized over the question for a week.

Discussing world matters

Danish children are informed about adult topics from the moment they are old enough to ask about them. They are encouraged to actively participate in adult discussions and to have opinions about things. I myself was told to be seen and not heard, and not to “count old people’s teeth”. They would invite me to their discussion when I was big enough.

I’m still waiting.

This open relationship between children and parents lays the foundation for how they relate to each other in the future, but this doesn’t necessarily predict a rosy scenario. It often means that children, who are naturally entitled to everything, are just more vocal about their need for freedom and independence later in life, which often leads to slightly strained feelings when parents try to assert their right to interfere. This creates the impression in foreigners that Danish parents and children are always fighting. Children from more traditional families would probably just suppress their true feelings in these situations, making everything seem a lot more harmonious than they really are.

Bricks in the wall?
Because everyone is equal, social consensus is established early in a Dane’s life. There are no outrageous anomalies in the social way of things, so it is learned without difficulty. The social model is simple enough for all to grasp. There are many aspects to this, and everyone has his own crazy theory.

Crazy theory 1: the language. The Danish language is the prime instrument in the functional universe that inhabits the mind of the Dane. Its relation to the world is linear and complete. Nothing else exists outside it. Unlike English, it hasn’t raided, plundered and looted sounds and impressions from faraway shores to the extent that a Danish speaker is in a constant state of uncertainty, curiosity and conjecture about the world he lives in.

Danish is content with what it can see and touch. It doesn’t aspire to the ethereal and fantastical. Many Danes describe their knowledge of Danish as “complete”, something no English speaker would ever dream of doing.

It creates the impression in me that Danes have everything wrapped up in a neat bundle. Their egalitarian world-view is simply a facilitator, a tool with which to trim off all the pesky, uneven bits of uncertainty. And to an extent it is something I admire and envy, because Danes are almost completely without chaos.

Crazy theory 2: everything else. Everything else that Danes do simply reinforces my first crazy theory. An overwhelming sense of conformity infuses the entire fabric of Danish culture. My first thoughts, as I landed here, were that sensual impressions seemed wilfully subdued. I was constantly seeking the outrageous colours, sounds and smells of my homeland.

Menaces to democracy

The other day, while reading a computer magazine in the library, one of the letters to the editor complained about the magazine being too colourful. The editor used half a page to apologize and to explain the reason for using all those colours.

Instead of finding it absurd, I found some small solace in it. It confirmed my thoughts. Dissenting colours are an aberration and a menace to democracy.

People from back home always ask me what the Danes eat, and similarly, the Danes always ask what we eat back home. Why does this question come up so often? Are people genuinely interested, or is it just an idle question? Upon reflection I realize that, besides our clothes and language, what we eat probably reveals most about how we identify culturally with others.

Funny because it’s true
Chris Rock talks about racism because that’s important to him and to a large number of people around the world, and about sex because everyone thinks sex is funny somehow. They represent universal experiences and human constants, things that resonate with the vast majority of people. I noticed recently, while watching a stand-up comic on TV, that Danish comedians spend an inordinate amount of time making jokes about rye bread and liver paté.

First, I’ll come right out and say it: Danish food is nothing to write home about. The main ingredients are meat, potatoes and salad. Add to that the compulsory gravy (and the rye bread and liver paté you had for breakfast), and the contents of your stomach, upon random daily inspection, will be a fairly consistent woody brown. If you are used to porridge and bacon and eggs (or at least anything cooked or fried), your first Danish breakfast will be a bit baffling.

Caramelized potatoes, a Christmas speciality

I distinctly remember thinking, after having breakfast in Denmark for the first time: “So, when’s breakfast?”. There were some open rye bread sandwiches with cheese, pickled herring and cold cuts, followed by a cup of coffee. In a similar vein, when my mother came to Denmark to attend our wedding, it was already well after midnight at the wedding reception, with people dancing and the band playing, when she enquired, “Where’s the main course?”.

Closed sandwiches are in the domain of American franchise stores. You will never see it in a Danish home. The other day I saw my father-in-law cut a roll in half and put a slice of cheese on the bottom half. Then, with a mischievous glint in his eye and a furtive glance to check that no one was watching, he put the top half of the roll on top of it. He held it up to the light for all to see and exclaimed, “Hey, a cheeseburger!”

Older generations of Danes might also have a shot of snaps with their breakfast. Snaps is a bitter aperitif with quite a bit of a kick, that most foreigners tend to forego after getting on its bad side only once or twice.

Spice of life
Danish food is as straightforward and devoid of pomp and ceremony as the Danes themselves. Its function is first and foremost to get your hunger out of the way. The Danes spend a lot of time at the table. The conversations range from the mundane to the intense, and family discussions and disputes are often aired at the dinner table. After dinner, the conversation will often continue for another hour or more, and if there is really much to discuss, it can take several hours.

You might find yourself in a situation where, in the heat of the discussion, everyone has switched to Danish and temporarily forgotten that you exist. If you are painfully polite, you might feel obliged to sit through the whole thing, while your nether regions slowly become indifferent to any form of sensation. You might wonder why, if the Danes spend so much quality time at the table, it hasn’t occurred to them to make the dining experience a bit more varied and interesting. Why not add a bit of spice and flavour? Why not enrich the culinary vocabulary with something imaginative and daring?

Since the Turks, Palestinians and Iranians began arriving in the 70s, Danes have slowly started to develop a taste for…, well, a taste. There are plenty of kebab places everywhere in Denmark, and it seems to be quite a hit among the younger generation of Danes. These places usually also sell pizzas (which curiously all look and taste the same everywhere), burritos, burgers, pastas and so on.

Gift of the gaffe
As with most things, Danes are quite punctual and precise. This includes dinner preparation. The amount of food will be prepared according to the expected number of diners. No more, no less. Almost every foreigner has some horror story to tell about frikadeller (meat balls), specifically how they happened to scoop an ample mound of them onto their plate, only to discover that they were supposed to take only two or three. Danes will stare at you in disbelief, but usually no one will say anything until maybe your Danish better-half points something out.

Duck, another Christmas favourite

Once, after having finished my meal, my mother-in-law insisted that I have the last piece of steak. I accepted, and proceeded to eat it, completely oblivious to the stares I was getting. It was only much later that my wife told me that it’s customary to eat something else with one’s steak; not to eat it on its own.

Mind your manners
Before dinner it is polite to help out with preparations. Usually offering to help set the table is more than sufficient. Everyone drinks something with their dinner. It is not a requirement to have a drink, but at special occasions someone is bound, at some point, to lift his glass and say “Skål!“. For this reason it is a good idea to have a glass of something at hand. The Skål! is usually followed by a lifting of the glass and acknowledging every guest by giving them an ever-so-brief nod.

Danes are not overly polite, so dinnertime is always quite relaxed. If something is reasonably within reach on the table, just reach over and get it yourself. If you come from a religious background and are used to saying grace, you can go ahead and say grace by yourself. You will be considered a mild curiosity, but no one will think more of it (unless you demand that everyone does it, in which case you’ll be considered a bit of a bother).

After dinner you always acknowledge the host by saying “Tak for mad” (see more phrases). If offered more food than you can eat, decline by saying “Jeg er mæt“. You might feel inclined to use the word “fuld” (full), as in “Jeg er fuld“, but this of course means that you are drunk. If you notice that the conversation is only just picking up speed, and you don’t necessarily want to be part of it, there is no reason to torture yourself by staying. Just excuse yourself and do as you please.

Read more about Danish food at Wikipedia and Copenhagenet.