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Danish Language or Da-ih Langa? | ||
Tags: Danish | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| cameroncrc Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6522 days ago 195 posts - 185 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Ukrainian | Message 1 of 18 21 July 2007 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been trying to decide on a country to go to for a foreign exchange trip. At the present time, it is between The Netherlands and Denmark. However, I seem to be having trouble grasping the pronunciation of the Danish language. I would much rather learn Swedish or Norwegian, whose pronunciation makes much more sense to me. Is it as difficult as it looks to speak Danish correctly? Help!
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| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6449 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 2 of 18 21 July 2007 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've only been learning Danish for about two weeks, so I might not be best placed to answer you but I'll give it a go.
What exactly do you mean by "pronunciation"? The way you mentioned that Swedish or Norwegian's pronunciation "makes much more sense" implies to me that you're thinking at least partly of the spelling and how it relates to the spoken word. At first, it seems difficult and words aren't pronounced how you'd expect them to be. However, you'll quickly get a feel for it. After less than two weeks I can predict quite well how a word will sound. Of course there'll be exceptions, words that have two different pronunciations and all the rest, but every language will have them. I need to learn my vowels a bit better, but reading aloud isn't quite so bad as I imagined. Actually saying the Danish words is quite difficult, I must admit. I thought Dutch was quite hard to pronounce, incidentally, though I've never tried it myself. There are some odd sounds, but from what other forum members here tell me, Danes will be quite forgiving with any mistakes you make. However, I don't really feel that I know enough to tell you how hard it will be to sound decent in Danish, so I'll leave that for someone more knowledgeable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cameroncrc Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6522 days ago 195 posts - 185 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Ukrainian | Message 3 of 18 23 July 2007 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
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What I mean is, half of the letters aren't pronounced. It seems rather confusing to see the word "Jeg" and hear it pronounced "yay".
I do actually enjoy hearing and seeing the language, but it seems so hard! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6391 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 4 of 18 23 July 2007 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
In actual fact, Danish - from a fair distance - sounds amazingly close to Dutch spoken with a Randstand accent. (^_^) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6449 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 5 of 18 31 July 2007 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||
That is initially confusing, but you quickly learn the rules. It's not like English where one group of letters, such as "ough" can have loads of different sounds. It looks really random but it's more regular than you'd imagine. I'm finding the glottal stop a tricky point, but I'm not sure that it's really a make or break issue. I wouldn't let the pronunciation put you off. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zankou77 Newbie United States Joined 5250 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Danish | Message 6 of 18 06 September 2010 at 3:34am | IP Logged | ||
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You might find this link helpful to get you started: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/danish.htm
The really important notes (why is this not explicitly stated on any teach-yourself literature?): c = [ s ] before e or i, [ k ] elsewhere e = [ ɑ ] before g d = [ ð ] after a vowel, [ d ] at the start of a word, silent after l, n or r and before t or s g = [ ɪ ] after a vowel, [ ʒ ] in words of foreign origin. The g in words ending in ig is silent, e.g. kedelig (boring) h is not pronounced before v or j I wish there were resources available specifically geared toward accent. I've been scouring book stores, enviously eying the vast array of resources for French, Spanish, and Italian; but not much is coming up for Danish... If you're still trying to pick between Dutch and Danish, I'd argue that Danish is a lot more interesting (personal opinion, granted), but you may want to consider the fact that most book stores, on average, seem to have (literally) about 5 times the selection for Dutch language resources as Danish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 18 06 September 2010 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||
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One important detail about Danish is that it can be pronounced clearly,and tthe number of words whose pronunciation isn't predicatable is then reduced very much. There are still a number of special cases which must be learned by heart because they are spoken in a reduced form compared to the writing, but we are absolutely not on the level of for instance English.
For instance the verb "at give" has the present form "giver" and the participle "givet". They can be pronounced like that in slow speech, but normally we say /at gi/, /gi'r/ and /giet/ (/i/ here is pronounced like short or long /ee/ in English). One peculiar case is that we officially write "at" + infinitive, at that's how it is said when it is quoted in isolation. But in almost all other cases it we pronounce an open o alone or with a /w/-sound - exactly like we pronounce the word "og" ('and'). The result is that many people now write "og" in cases like "komme og gøre noget" (instead of "komme at gøre noget"). I'll not give more detais, but just say that the key to learning Danish pronounciation is to know the long form and be prepared for a shortened version. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pio_n Newbie Micronesia Joined 5998 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes | Message 8 of 18 11 September 2010 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
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What particularly confuses me is there is hardly any rules for where to pronounce the glottal stop in unknown words. While the rest danish spelling is somewhat documented, this remains a mistery for me. Perhaps as with hebrew or arabic reading without vowels, correct glottal stop spelling can be achieved only when you already know the word or can recognise it first from the context.
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