How Difficult is Danish? The Secret to Fluency
Hej! Jeg vil gerne bede om en kop filter kaffe.
Blank stare..
En kop filter kaffe?
Nå ja, en filter kaffe? That’ll be 35 kroner please. Would you like milk with that?
Sound familiar?
For many learners of Danish this is an all too common scenario. You go to your Danish class, you practise some phrases to use in the real world, your teacher tells you that you’re doing great, and then, when you go to use the phrases in real life, you’re met with incomprehension followed by the inevitable switch to English.
This struggle to communicate, this difficulty in expressing the simplest of phrases, this seeming resistance by Danes to entertain or appreciate your efforts, can quickly lead to a loss in motivation to learn the language.
I have personally lost count of the number of friends who have told me that Danish is just too difficult, or that it is easier to get by speaking English.
Is Danish really that difficult? What is it that causes people to struggle? Let’s dig into it.
How difficult is Danish to learn?
According to the Foreign Service Institute, for English speakers, Danish is not that difficult. It ranks Danish as one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, suggesting that you can reach “General Professional Proficiency in Speaking” in just 24 weeks.
Why then, is there such a disparity between the theoretical “easiness” of Danish for English speakers, and the reality for so many people living in Denmark?
In my experience, it all comes down to a few key things:
- The approach to language learning, and how the traditional language class approach is particularly detrimental to Danish
- Danish pronunciation (and the lack of focus on pronunciation in language learning) In fact, I would go as far as to say that working on pronunciation is the single most effective thing you can do to boost your Danish language ability.
- The social factor – how easy it is to ‘settle on English’
Let’s look into each factor in more detail.
Approach to language learning
Conventional methods for learning languages, Danish included, focuses on building up vocabulary and learning grammar rules. Some speaking and writing is then introduced in the form of repetition. Then maybe, just maybe, is proper pronunciation practice introduced.
The problem with this is that as we discussed, Danish is an “easy” language for English speakers. The vocabulary and grammar is relatively straightforward. It is speaking, listening and pronunciation that is likely to cause issues.
A focus on pronunciation will therefore give you the greatest bang for your buck in terms of improving your language skills. Get good at the difficult part and the rest will fall into place.
Spending more time and effort focusing on pronunciation training from the VERY BEGINNING can have a huge impact on your listening skills, speaking skills, and the rate at which you will learn and absorb new vocabulary and grammar, without the need for rote learning.
What is your goal in learning Danish?
Most people are learning a new language in order to communicate with speakers of that language – whether that be ordering a coffee, making smalltalk, using the language in the workplace, or connecting with loved ones.
One of the fastest ways to get better at speaking, is to practise speaking.
This is the concept behind Fluent in 3 Months – speak from the start, let go of inhibitions and fear of mistakes, and learn as you go.
This is invaluable advice of which I am a firm believer. I have used this concept in learning Spanish, Italian, and Danish, and have been amazed time and again at how much more I have learnt as a beginner by struggling through a ten minute conversation with a friend than spending two hours in a language class.
However, I would always hit a stumbling block in “just getting out there and speaking”. I eventually came to the realisation that my blockage wasn’t that I didn’t know enough words or didn’t understand the grammar well enough, but that I had no clue when it came to pronunciation. This affected my ability to understand, to speak, and to have fun, flowing conversation!
Realising this was my biggest revelation in how to learn languages fast. Let me use the rest of this article to convince you that improving pronunciation is the single most effective way to improve your Danish.
The Importance of Pronunciation – My Story
Let me take you back to 2012. I had studied Spanish for 2 years at university, scraping my way through oral exams and getting pretty good at understanding the language on an abstract level, when I moved to Jaén in the south of Spain. I landed, moved into my new apartment, and hit the streets, excited to meet people and use all the Spanish I had been learning.
Except I couldn’t communicate with anyone. At all. My colleagues would ask me how I was doing – I wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t order a coffee. It seemed like a completely new language to me, and it didn’t sound anything like what I was expecting or what I had learnt.
After struggling for months, I began to trawl through the internet for advice, finally trying to immerse myself in the language by forcing myself to speak only in Spanish, listening only to Spanish music, watching TV in Spanish, reading the newspaper everyday.
It worked – to some extent. I could feel that my language skills were getting better, but I would still be stumped by the most basic conversation. I had some friends around for dinner and one of them asked me if I needed help – “te ayudo?”. Two simple words and I still had no clue. They repeated it several times before resorting to English.
This is when I realised that my problem wasn’t the words or anything else I had been taught, but my ability to process the sounds that were coming at me as words.
I started to delve into pronunciation training. In particular I followed the Mimic Method, practising the sounds of the language everyday and learning the rhythm of the sentences – the music of the language. Within a month everything had changed. Suddenly I could hear the language. It was no longer just a stream of sound coming at me. Communication started to flow naturally. A few months later, locals were even mistaking me for a native speaker.
Building upon this success, I focussed on pronunciation from the start when learning Italian and Danish, and found similar success. I quickly overcame the hurdles of the language sounding like a blur.
Why does learning pronunciation help so much?
At the most basic level, in using language to communicate, we are making sounds from which the other person interprets meaning. When they speak back to us, we are listening to the sounds they make and interpreting meaning from them. It makes sense, therefore, that one of the fundamental aspects of language learning is understanding the sounds of the language.
Improving Listening Skills
One of the main difficulties in learning a new language is that it can sound very fast and you are unable to pick up on the words, even though you know the words!
This is the major complaint that I hear about the Danish language – it sounds mumbled and fast and all of the words blend into one. What is happening here is not that the speaker is blending all the words together, but that the listener cannot differentiate between all the different sounds.
This is true of all languages, but is especially true of Danish. Danish is a language of many vowel sounds, and to the untrained ear, many of these vowels sound the same. How can you possibly begin to hear the different words being spoken at you when it all sounds the same? Once you train your ear to differentiate between the different sounds, you will all of a sudden hear all of the different words in the sentence and everything will seem much slower. You may not understand all the words, but you will be able to pick out the ones that you don’t understand, instead of just hearing a blur of noise. If you put the time and effort into this from the beginning, your listening skills will skyrocket.
Improving Speaking Skills
In a similar vein, your ability to speak Danish (or any language, for that matter) will improve greatly when you are able to reproduce the different sounds of the language. This will make communication easier, more natural, and more enjoyable for everyone involved. You also won’t need to panic and mentally prepare yourself for the difficult words to pronounce (of which there are many!) or for miscommunications when talking about your new gold (guld), not yellow (gul) watch.
The Written Language
If the pronunciation of Danish is the number one complaint of Danish learners, the written language has to be number two. Why are there so many letters? Why don’t they pronounce half the letters?
In order to overcome this, it is again important to focus on pronunciation. And early. Every language associates written letters to sounds in different ways – compare the “j” sound of the English Jutland and the Danish equivalent Jylland (pronounced like an English “y”)
Once we establish mispronunciations through reading, it can be difficult to get rid of them.
To take another Danish example, if you first learn the word selvfølgelig through reading it, it can be difficult to convince yourself of the usual pronunciation, which drops the g’s, v, and l.
The solution to this is to focus on learning the word through hearing and pronouncing it first, and learning to read it later. There have been many times in my Danish learning journey where I have seen a word written for the first time after saying it for years and been shocked (akavet?!) – the benefit to learning it this way around is that I already know how to pronounce the word so I won’t develop bad habits, and I’ll never forget how to spell it because the ridiculous spelling has surprised me so much.
The Social Factor
A final point that is true of all languages, but especially true of Danish, is the social factor. Many of my friends who have given up on learning Danish have told me that they are sick of people not understanding them, laughing at their accent, or switching to English as soon as they hear an accent. And also, all Danes speak good English anyway, right?
It can be extremely frustrating when you have put the effort in and are trying your best, but people are giving you a blank expression or struggling to understand what you are saying.
With Danish more than any other language I have studied, I see this as a major factor in many people giving up. What is the point in learning when people don’t understand anyway?
This is again where pronunciation training comes in. If you work on your pronunciation and suddenly people understand you, it will motivate you to learn more. Better yet, when you improve your pronunciation, go to the coffee shop, order your filter coffee and they ask you IN DANISH if you would like milk, you will feel a great sense of achievement that will again motivate you to get even better.
And every time someone replies in Danish and not English, you get the opportunity (without having to self motivate to keep speaking Danish or asking them to speak Danish), to keep speaking – learning more and more with every interaction – new vocabulary, new ways to say things, and above all else – developing the confidence to know that it is possible!
How to improve pronunciation
So how do we go about improving our pronunciation?
This is a big topic that I break down into smaller parts in this guide to Danish pronunciation.
If you want other tips on how to improve your Danish, check out this 3 step guide to learning Danish.
