Learn Danish: 3 steps to unlocking fluency

Danish is an enigma.

It’s a Germanic language similar to English, with a lot of shared vocabulary and grammar. It shouldn’t be too difficult to learn. Yet there’s something about it that stumps people.

I’ve known real language nerds who have moved to Copenhagen and left with nothing more than a “skål” and a “tak”.

Then there are the committed souls who have completed all the sprogskole (language school) courses and still can’t hold a decent conversation.

It seems that the majority come to Denmark full of enthusiasm for learning the language, only to lose all motivation within a few months. 

Just what is it that makes it so difficult to learn Danish?

Many blame the pronunciation – Danish is a language full of new vowels, strange consonants and silent letters.

But there’s more to the story.

Pronunciation is certainly one of the main obstacles new learners have to overcome, but it is linked to an even greater challenge – motivation. As most Danes have a high level of English, it’s easy to get lazy. How many times have you thought, “Ah, it’s easier to just communicate in English”?

This theory holds true in that my friends from non-English speaking backgrounds seem to have no trouble learning Danish – despite the “difficult pronunciation” we English speakers love to use as an excuse. 

So what can we do about it?

People often ask me how I learnt to speak Danish, and I believe my journey can offer some valuable insights to those struggling with some of the same things I did. While my approach may not be for everyone, it was born out of years of language learning and study, and I think there is a lot that can be taken from it. 

It was also born out of laziness – I love learning new languages, but I hate learning new languages. Sitting in a language classroom, learning grammar rules, or memorising vocabulary (even with flash cards or other “fun” ways to do it) bores the life out of me.

My learning method focuses on getting the most value for money in my actual “study” time, and then having fun using the language in the real world. 

In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the most important aspects of learning a new language, covering everything from motivation to pronunciation and speaking.

But before we get into all that, let’s look at what doesn’t work.

“Sprogskole” – it’s time to skip school

How good are you at the languages you learnt at school?

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably pretty bad. I took five years of French and can’t speak a word of it. At university, I spent two years in a beginner Spanish class, passed all my exams and felt fairly confident with my ability. Then I moved to Spain and couldn’t understand a word. For about 4 months I wandered around the streets of Andalucía with a headache, thinking that it was all a big conspiracy and they actually spoke a different language to the one I had been taught.   

Eventually, low on confidence after yet another embarrassing day of failed communication, I ditched studying the language itself to study how to learn a language. I quickly realised that I wasn’t the only one struggling with traditional methods. Following this research, I tried out all sorts of new techniques and suggestions to improve my Spanish. Some worked, some didn’t. In the end I hit upon a couple of things that helped me improve rapidly. 

The following year, I started to learn Italian. This time I avoided the traditional route and went straight for the techniques that helped my Spanish. And it worked again. Within a couple of months I was able to get by fairly comfortably and in less than half a year I was building friendships and having deep conversations in Italian.

Then I moved to Denmark and enrolled in Danish classes.

I’m not sure why I abandoned my tried and true method, but with the lack of Danish learning material online, I thought I’d be best off in the classroom.

I lasted a few weeks. 

Classes were packed, with minimal time for creative practice. The teacher would stand at the front, teach us how to say “Hi, I am from …. “ and then go round the class one by one making us painstakingly repeat the phrase while the minutes slipped by. 2 hours later, we’d leave the class no better off. 

I quickly lost any desire to return. This is the point I have seen many people reach and then give up, stuck in the eternal beginner stage where the initial motivation has worn off and the thought of cycling 20 minutes in the rain to sit in a class where you learn grammar rules for a language you feel like you’ll never understand is suddenly not very appealing.

It was time to go back to my trusty old approach.

Danish threw up a couple of challenges for me. It’s a small language with less material to work with and a more challenging social setting (try walking out of your apartment in Denmark and finding a Dane to speak Danish to, without resorting to English, compared to walking out of your apartment in Spain and speaking Spanish). 

But these additional challenges helped me refine my approach, using the most effective tools at the right stage of the journey to make the most progress in a sustainable manner. 

It is this approach that I want to share with you in the hope that you can overcome your challenges and have fun learning Danish.   

It all comes down to 3 key aspects – personalisation, pronunciation, and speaking.

Personalisation – the motivation secret 

When you say ‘motivation’, most people think of the big picture, the ‘why’ behind your desire to learn.

However, just knowing your ‘why’ won’t get you too far. It’s too abstract, like a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym in search of the perfect ‘summer body’. If you hate going to the gym you won’t last very long. But if you find a workout that you love doing, then you’re going to stick at it, and eventually achieve your goals. The secret? Enjoying the process.

The same is true of learning a language.

Enter personalisation. You need to personalise your learning so that you have a connection with your learning material. This means finding something in Danish culture that interests you enough to make you keep coming back to it.

In my years teaching English in Spain and Italy, I noticed a trend. The kids in the schools who were interested in a particular aspect of English culture tended to be the best at the language. I had one 14 year old student with an incredible vocabulary he had picked up from reading Harry Potter. Another was a huge music fan who had developed a great pronunciation from singing along to songs. Another wanted to stream video games and found he got a better online following when he spoke in English. 

Over and over again I noticed that my best students weren’t necessarily the A-grade students, but those who had a reason to keep returning to the language – the magic of personalisation. 

Personalisation was easy for me when I learnt Spanish. There were thousands of films, different genres of music, amazing writers – a whole continent worth of culture to find something I enjoyed. 

But Danish? Well, I had to dig a bit. The good news is that all you need is one thing – one singer, one TV show, one film.

Let’s say you are really into a particular singer. You can use the songs to practise your listening and pronunciation, you can watch or listen to interviews to the same benefit, and you can read lyrics or articles about the artist to improve your reading skills and vocabulary.

It is not enough to just passively listen to the artist – you have to study them, work out what the lyrics mean, work out what the interviews are about.

All of a sudden, you’re not just learning the language, but connecting with it.

Traditional material, with its dry and detached approach, often misses the mark. Real progress stems from passion. So take the time to get obsessed about something in Danish and you will start to immerse yourself in language that is meaningful to you.

Pronunciation – the eureka moment

Improving your pronunciation in Danish is possibly the most effective way to improve your overall language skills. I spent a lot of my actual “study” time on pronunciation training. 

You may know the feeling – after a few months of language school you are getting pretty good at reading Danish, but your listening and speaking skills are lagging way behind. When people speak to you it sounds like a big blur of vowels and you can’t differentiate the words. And when you speak, Danes look at you like you’re crazy, and even though you’re sure you are speaking clearly, they still can’t understand. 

This is because you don’t yet have a strong enough grasp of the sounds and flow of the Danish language. For me, working on my pronunciation was pivotal. With a bit of practice, the blur of vowels soon became individual words, and when I spoke, I was replied to… in Danish.

So how do you improve your pronunciation?

This is a huge, important topic that I have covered in more depth here, but to give an overview, you need to work on phonemes (the sounds of the language) and prosody (the music or flow of the language):

1. The Sounds. Every language is made up of a unique set of sounds. Many of these sounds are common across languages (the Danish ‘f’ and English ‘f’ are the same, for example) but when learning a new language, there will be some sounds you are unfamiliar with. In Danish, those sounds are the soft ‘d’, the ‘r’, the ‘t’, and all those weird vowels. It is a good idea to learn how to create these sounds and practise them over and over again. This is a really good resource to hear all the different sounds. 
2. The Music. Just as every language has its own set of sounds, these sounds are also put together in a particular flow. The sentences move at a certain speed, with emphasis on certain syllables, rising and falling in tone in a particular pattern. This is why we think of some languages, such as Italian, as being very musical, whereas similar languages such as Spanish can sound more staccato or machine gun-like. A good way to practise the music of Danish is to take a phrase from a recording, analyse it (where are the emphasises, where does the tone rise or fall?), and sing it back.

When you combine the new sounds you have learnt with the musicality of the language, you will begin to sound, and feel, a lot more comfortable. You will be easier to understand, and you will recognise the patterns of the language and understand the flow of it, even if you don’t understand every word.   

Speaking – your ticket to fluency

Kill the nerves – Speak early, speak often

Let’s face it, speaking is the most nerve wracking part of learning a new language. That is why it is so important to speak early, before you feel like you should know the correct words. The longer you study the language before speaking it, the more difficult it is to shake the school teacher voice in your head telling you that you need get the right answer.

I’ve always found that I’m most confident with a language when I only know a few words. How do I get by? I use them creatively, I use hand gestures, I do whatever I need to communicate the message. This approach makes the first few conversations a whole lot of fun – you’ll laugh at your miscommunications rather than see them as a failure, and speaking will become a fun challenge, rather than an exam. For someone like me, who is quite introverted and doesn’t like to make ‘mistakes’, it is really important to build this habit early and keep the momentum going.

Speaking is hard – that’s why it’s so powerful

Speaking is, quite simply, the best way to get better at speaking. It is difficult, because you have to produce language and not just understand it. Most people will be able to read the Danish word for mouse, ‘mus’, and have a good guess at what it means. A lot of people will be able to hear the word ‘mus’ and have a good guess at the meaning. The difficult part is producing the word ‘mus’ in conversation. But being forced to produce a word, rather than simply recognise it, is exactly what will help you solidify new vocabulary so that you won’t forget it. Use the word ‘mus’ twice in a conversation and I guarantee you that you’ll remember it better than if you read it 10 times.

So how do we speak from the start?

Here are a few strategies that I like to employ.

1. Learn to ask questions

The easiest way to start a conversation is by asking a question. Learn how to ask for directions, for prices, the time, how someone’s day is, and go out and use it! You might not understand the responses, but that’s ok – you can always ask for clarification. I found that asking questions gave me a confidence boost in knowing that I could communicate in the language. If I waited for the Danish speaker to lead the conversation, I would probably have been lost from the start and resorted to English. 

2. 10 minutes without English

Whenever I would meet up with friends or colleagues, we would take 10 minutes in which we were only allowed to communicate in Danish. Ten minutes was an achievable amount of time – not too long that it would seem too daunting for me, or too annoying for the friend, but plenty of time to learn a lot.

When you take 10 minutes of Danish, talk as much as possible. Talk about your day, your plans, ask your friend about their day, their plans, their life. It’s ok if you already know the answers. Forget about being interesting or funny – just talk. 

3. The dreaded switch to English

You might find that you go out and try to use your newly learnt Danish only to be replied to in English. This doesn’t mean the Danish speaker is judging you or your language skills! Often, Danes will speak English either to make you feel more comfortable or to make the communication smoother (the whole purpose of language!).

Here you have two options – you can either switch to English as well, and do this so many times that eventually you give up on Danish altogether… or you can choose to keep speaking Danish. 

I had a few strategies for dealing with this: 

1. Just keep speaking Danish. Eventually the other person will change back.  
2. If speaking with a friend, simply ask them to take it seriously. I found a big shift in how comfortable I felt speaking Danish after saying “I really want to learn this so I would like you to take it seriously”. Suddenly my awful Danish skills were treated with respect and not as entertainment.
3. Pronunciation. As I detailed above, improving your pronunciation will help your overall understanding of the language. It will also help keep the conversation in Danish, as you will sound more comfortable. 

The 3 steps to Danish mastery

The ultimate secret to learning Danish (or any language) is to find a reason to learn – to learn without it being a task. By focusing on things you enjoy, you will avoid the motivation problems that many of my sprogskole friends suffered.

Let’s break it down

1. Personalisation – find something within Danish culture that interests you and make it your new hobby. Read about it for your reading practice, watch interviews about it for your listening practice, talk about it for your speaking practice. 
2. Pronunciation – work on developing and improving your pronunciation. This will help you progress much faster in your overall speaking and listening. 
3. Speak – Speak early, speak often. Relish that initial phase, where every conversation is a tiny triumph. Toss out the quest for perfection – if you are communicating, you are winning!

Making Danish a part of your everyday life is your fast track to fluency. Language is not something you can study for the night before an exam. Make a habit of using Danish consistently and improvements will come. Sometimes the improvements will come quickly, sometimes they will come slowly. That’s just how it is – our job is to enjoy the ride.