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Log Subforum: Danish as a rare language!

 Language Learning Forum : Skandinavisk & Nordisk Post Reply
31 messages over 4 pages: 13 4  Next >>
montmorency
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 Message 9 of 31
21 June 2012 at 7:18pm | IP Logged 
stelingo wrote:
However I did enjoy the Danish political series Borgen, shown
recently on the BBC (in Danish with subtitles). And quite a lot of Brits now know the
Danish for prime minister, Staatsminister.



For anyone interested, I have just realised that BBC4 is currently repeating
"Borgen" on Wednesday evenings, 2300 BST.

(I missed it; thanks goodness for iPlayer; that was episode 2/10. We have 6 days to
watch it (longer if you download it I think). Unfortunately, it's too late to watch
episode 1, unless you have already downloaded it).

I didn't find the politics especially interesting, to be honest, except for the parts
about Greenland, which I wasn't expecting. For the rest, one soon gets the picture that
parties in coalition have to make compromises with their principles in order to get
anything done at all (and we had enough of that in "Forbrydelsen I", when it was still
a bit of a novelty). No, what was interesting was the human side of the story, and of
course, trying to pick out Danish words. It was also good to see Soren Malling again.
(Jan Meyer in Forbrydelsen I).
.
.
I'm never sure about the availability of BBC iPlayer outside the UK. I used to think it
was 100% unavailable, but then a friend of mine in Germany said he'd watched or
listened to something (it might have been radio rather than TV); maybe it depends on
the individual programme (licensing restrictions or something). Anyway, if there is
anything on BBC you want to watch or listen to via the internet, and you live outside
the UK, it might just be worth a shot.

.
Also, if you are a guru (or a friends with one), you can do clever things with proxy
servers...

Edited by montmorency on 21 June 2012 at 7:22pm

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tibbles
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 Message 10 of 31
21 June 2012 at 7:59pm | IP Logged 
stelingo wrote:
And sounds less pleasant to the ear than its cousins Swedish and Norwegian


I lived in Denmark in 1994, so I feel that Danish sounds much more pleasant and familiar than Swedish or Norwegian. :) Also, in some ways, Danish has a lot more in common with English than other Scandinavian languages. I remember on the first day of my Danish language class, the teacher had us read excerpts of Danish from a book and try to guess their meaning in English. All of us, even with zero knowledge were able to make out the meanings of the sentences that we had to read.

To me the challenges of learning Danish are (1) the soft pronunciation, and (2) the overly helpful natives who will always answer you in English! I'm not interested in learning Danish anymore, but from time to time I do enjoy watching a Danish drama such as _Forbrydelsen_ ("The Killing").

One funny story about Denmark is that one of my American friends lived in a town that he simply could not prounce: Trørød. He always had to write it on paper for the taxi driver!

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Aquila123
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 Message 11 of 31
29 June 2012 at 12:13am | IP Logged 
Most foreigner trying to learn Danish end up speaking something that sounds more like Norwegian.

This is not a too badf outcome, though.
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montmorency
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 Message 12 of 31
30 June 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged 
Aquila123 wrote:
Most foreigner trying to learn Danish end up speaking something that
sounds more like Norwegian.

This is not a too badf outcome, though.



Well I started off trying to learn Norwegian, but have transferred to Danish, so it seems
that (if I persevere far and long enough) I will end up coming full circle!    :-)


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Aquila123
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 Message 13 of 31
29 July 2012 at 12:27am | IP Logged 
KimG wrote:
Danish got slightly harder pronounciation than Norwegian or Swedish, yes. But exept that, I see no reason to not learn it, if there's some reason, like living close to Denmark, going there often, or something similiar, the language is a better choice than learning Norwegian and practice it in Denmark.
If one want to learn one scandinavian language, and really don't have any special reason to pick one, Danish would be the one hardest to learn to pronounce initially, but learning the difference on Swedish and Norwegian Tone 1 and 2 is a feat few foregin learners learn, it's possible the difficulty of Danish versus Swedish/Norwegian is a bit exaggerated.


Danish has a fenomenon called "stød", meaning "toss" instead of the tunes. It consists of chopping a vowel in two parts with a rapid clottal constriction, and in such a way that there is still only one syllable. It is sometimes described as a glottal stop after the vowel, but I think it is better to describe it like i did here.

The presense or absense of this fenomenon plays approximately the same role as the tunes in Swedish and Norwegian.
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Solfrid Cristin
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 Message 14 of 31
29 July 2012 at 8:28am | IP Logged 
Aquila123 wrote:
Most foreigner trying to learn Danish end up speaking something that sounds more
like Norwegian.

This is not a too badf outcome, though.


I am seeing this in Iceland. They have learned Danish in school, but what comes out is fairly close to
Norwegian.
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montmorency
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 Message 15 of 31
29 July 2012 at 10:19pm | IP Logged 
I wonder if the same happens in Greenland?


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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 16 of 31
29 July 2012 at 11:55pm | IP Logged 
Why is this happening? Usually, the native pronunciation (and perhaps more important: prosody) seems to be hard to eliminate. Even though Icelandic doesn't exactly have the same prosody as Danish, I wonder how the Icelanders sound Norwegian.


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