Notes on Danish culture

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

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.

The Danish experience in Tokyo

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, which 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. Even after a number of years, when you think you’re fluent, you will find yourself overhearing a conversation between Danes and not understand a single word they are saying. I was recently driving with my wife while listening to the radio. Someone had called in to the show to complain about gangs that were harassing diners in outdoor restaurant areas. These gangs simply arrived en masse and took people’s food from their tables, and it was becoming an increasing problem in Copenhagen. The woman complained bitterly. Privately I thought she sounded like a whiny schoolgirl, but of course I said nothing because in fairness it was an outrageous injustice. But then my wife said, with a snicker, “Damn, that woman sounds like such a victim”. I said that it’s only natural, considering she had her food hijacked by a marauding gang of thugs. My wife said, “What gang? They’re talking about seagulls”.

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.

Tags: danish, language, learning, pronunciation

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 04:33 and is filed under Culture & norms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.