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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6645 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 17 of 97 30 July 2007 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, with a glottal stop it means the thing on top of a house (in the definite form). The past participle of "at tage" ('taken') has no glottal stop. One situation where you might find a glottal stop in a past participle is with a wordstem ending in a vowel. With a prefix such as "til-" or "-af" you can even find the rare case of a glottal stop with an unstressed syllable: Participles: det har sne'et ('(it has) snowed') - versus "vi er sneet inde" (we have been caught by the snow) hunden har gø'et hele natten (the dog has barked all night long) the same, but with a prefix: begå'et (committed (a crime)) - versus gået (walked) afgå'et ved døden ((he has) died) (NB: notice the position of the stress in this example!) besva'ret (answered) - versus (jeg har) svaret (I have answered) forsva'ret (defended) - versus svaret (answered) There can even be a glottal stop in the middle of a longer stem or with a consonant after, but only if there is a prefix. Note the position of the stress in the next examples: bero'liget (calmed down) - versus rolig (calm) jeg har forstu'vet min ankel (I have sprained my ankle) - versus stuvet blomkål (boiled cauliflower) afkalk'et (decalcified) - versus kalket (whitewashed) And no, I don't know why the prefix is necessary. Maybe some day I will find a counterexample. Many examples that look like participles, but with a glottal stop in front of a consonant, are in fact adjectives: tilsne'et (snowy) forkal'ket ('calcified' (=senile)) begav'et (gifted) betro'et (trusted) And yes, I know it sounds complicated. But listen to the words when you hear them and you will learn the correct pronunciation.
That's wrong. Both these enclitic articles are always pronounced, but the -et is often weakened into schwa + soft d. This soft d may not be so easy to hear as a -t, but is is nevertheless there and can't be omitted. The ending "-en" is always pronounced as schwa + n. As you have probably noticed, -(e)t is also used as the ending of the past participle. It is sometimes pronounced clearly as schwa + t (or hard d), sometimes weakened into schwa + soft d. No surprise in that. But there is one possibility more in the spoken language: you may hear the ending "-et" being replaced by "-en": "Han har funden den" (he has found it). It is an old and dialectal form of the participle of some strong verbs, that some people like to use just for fun. ... I hope that you can use these long posts - I have no idea how the problems I discuss here are described in the grammars and textbooks you use. I don't read grammars for Danish, but it is fun to try to formulate some of the rules that make the language tick. Edited by Iversen on 30 July 2007 at 4:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6386 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 18 of 97 30 July 2007 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hmm, this seems very complicated. I think I will try and listen out for it and see if that helps me get a feel for its use.
I am focusing more on pronunciation now, since my dictionary still hasn't arrived and the only other thing I have to do is learn words. I listened to and spoke along with the first two units of the TY course, which took about an hour and a half. However, I think it was time very well spent. At the beginning I spoke along with the dialogs but somewhere along the line I stopped doing that. Big mistake. I have countless little pronunciation errors in my speech now: I get vowels mixed up, ignore soft "d"s, forget that some consonants are pronounced differently in the middle of a word to at the start, etc. etc. I think I will stick with the first two units until I have them near perfect. A lot of people on here talk about memorizing drills, I might do this but I'm not sure how useful it would be. Something that's concerning me with my word learning is that I might be saying them wrongly, and so each time I learn them, I am reinforcing the error. So hopefully listening carefully to the dialogs should help with this. While listening I noticed two things - firstly, "smagte" (from "at smage") has a little catch after the "a". Please tell me this would be an example of a glottal stop! It might just be whatever way the actor said it though, since it only turned up once in the dialogs. That was the only time I thought I heard a glottal stop. I think I will listen specifically for them tomorrow. I also noticed that the pronunciation of "jeg" varies a little. When it is not being stressed, it sounds like "yeah", but when it is stressed, as in "men jeg tror..." it sounds more like "yi". Is this just casual speech sort of slurring things a bit (I noticed that "kan jeg" becomes one word), or is this particular to whatever accent the actor had, which I shouldn't imitate? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6645 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 19 of 97 30 July 2007 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I almost feel that I have to apologize for saying this, but NO - there is no glottal stop in "smagte". The only thing between the "a" and the "t" is the "g", which here is pronounced like "k" (i.e. a voiceless plosive) because of its proximity to the voiceless "t". It may be the abrupt way that the vowel "a" is cut short by a plosive that makes you believe that there is a stop. The word "smarte" (plural of 'smart') almost sound the same, but this word does have a true glottal stop (at least in the standard prononciation, - it sometimes is said without it). The "r" is almost silent (it just have the effect of opening up the preceding "a"), and then there is room for a glottal stop. Try to listen for some of the word pairs that I have indicated above, or check the following page on the internet: Cybercity (with audio examples). .
This is correct. You can say something like "yay" (all three letters are pronounced), but mostly you just hear a short "ya" (open a, no diphtong). In Jutland you can sometimes hear "a" (closed a, no diphtong and no y-sound), but that's purely dialectal and should be avoided in standard Danish. "Kan jeg" can be pronounced "kan' yai", but mostly it is shortened to "ka-yai" (stress on ka, and the whole thing pronounced as one word), and that's the variant you should adopt. Edited by Iversen on 30 July 2007 at 7:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6386 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 20 of 97 31 July 2007 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah, bugger. I thought I was getting somewhere. I had a look at the section on the glottal stop in the TY book, they didn't really go into a lot of detail about it but said that while a word like "man" doesn't have one, "mand" does. I'm guessing this is due to the silent "d". However, they'd written it at the end of the world ("man'") and I'm not quite sure how I'd pronounce that. Would "herover" have a glottal stop? I think I heard one between the "her" and "over", but it might just have been a vowel change. I'm dithering about whether to just ignore glottal stops. I spent a while today learning dialogues and speaking along with them again, and I think I have it pretty accurately, so perhaps glottal stops are too fine a feature to focus on now. On the other hand, it's better to do something right from the beginning, rather than going back to correct yourself. Out of interest, why does the "g" in "smagte" change to a "k"? I know that "k" becomes "g" in the middle of words, but I didn't know the reverse also happened. Sorry to bug a bit more, but what would be the correct pronunciation for "ikke"? I thought it would be "igg-eh" but it seems more like "ig" or even "eek". I also got a better handle on the soft "d" sound. I'm not sure why this caused me problems, since there is the exact same sound in English. I think it might be because I pronounce a word like "then" as "den" so I was actually a bit of practice when it came to using the soft "d". My English pronunciation is pretty atrocious, I should probably try and clean it up. I'm still using the flash card program, but I'm going through so many that I think I'm just really exposing myself to them rather than learning by heart.
Thanks for the link, but all the mp3 files seem to have gone. Perhaps I can get them from the Google Cache, I'm not sure if it would hold files.
Good to know, thanks. Edited by burntgorilla on 31 July 2007 at 5:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6645 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 21 of 97 31 July 2007 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Congratulations, - the glottal stop in "her'over" is a genuine one. I hope you won't give op the chase, because the glottal stop is essential if you want to speak Danish. I don't think that the -d in "mand" has much to say about stop/no stop. The pronoun "man" has no stop because it normally has no stress, whereas it is quite common to have the glottal stop after one-syllable substantives (both 'clean' and with the postfix definite article). If you just continue to listen for stops you will soon learn to identify them, and after that guessing where they should be is mostly a matter of a few rules of thumb plus a lot of exercise. Edited by Iversen on 31 July 2007 at 5:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6386 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 22 of 97 31 July 2007 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yay! My first catch :) I suppose I just need to tune my ears into the sound of them. Practice makes perfect, as they say. I'm listening to Danish radio, just to get used to the sounds more than anything. The sound of Danish is growing on me. Sometimes there are some horrible sounding bits but in general it has a nice lilt to it. The woman on Danmarks Radio P1 right now has quite a nice voice. I like to judge languages based on how nice "I love you" sounds. French rates highly, Spanish is ok, but Russian is the best. I'm still trying to decide where I'd put Danish.
Vocabulary is what is really holding me back right now, I know enough basic grammar to read simple things but I just don't have the words. And my dictionary still hasn't arrived, which is annoying. I find sellers on Amazon Marketplace can be very slow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6645 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 23 of 97 01 August 2007 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I hope your dictionary arrives soon, - a good dictionary is almost indispensable. I forgot to comment on the questions above. It is true that final 'g' in a syllable is normally weakened to a 'y'-like sound after e-i-y-æ-ø (front) and and a "w"-like sound after a-o-u-å (back). Between two wowels it becomes almost inaudible ("bage" bake: ba + schwa). It is normally also reduced when there is a a consonant after it ("løgsuppe", onion soup). However if this consonant is a 't' the "g" is sometimes pronounced almost like 'k', - for instance in front of the suffix -tig ("vigtig", important) and in a few other cases ("sigte", point (at); "magte", be capable of). However in other cases it is weakened ("ligtale", funerary speech; "bagtale" defamate, slander). It is difficult to give simple rules in this rather isolated case. Maybe I should add that the 'k' is only aspirated in the beginning of a syllable, - otherwise it is unaspirated. Hard 'g' and non-initial 'k' sound almost the same - the 'g' in "smagte" (tasted) and the 'k' in 'opvakte' (gifted) represent the same sound. When I say that the sound in front of 't' is 'k' rather than 'g' I do so to exclude the possibility that it might be weakened. If the 'g' is duplicated (as in "vægge", walls) then it is always pronounced. --- "Ikke" can be pronounced in its full form with a schwa at the end, for instance to make it more emphatic, but in most cases the "schwa" is omitted. Edited by Iversen on 02 August 2007 at 5:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6386 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 24 of 97 01 August 2007 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That information on "gt" is very useful, thanks. I've been learning a few words ending in "tig" so it's useful to have the correct pronunciation. I'm a bit worried that I'm learning the words with an incorrect pronunciation, but I suppose it's not going to completely mutilate the word, and they all appear in the TY dialogues so I can get the correct pronunciation from them. You know, I never realised that "k" was aspirated. I love the way learning languages makes you discover things that you wouldn't have thought about otherwise. Finding that a language uses two words where I have one usually makes me think about the concepts in a new light. I find an unaspirated "k" quite hard to do, I'm not sure if it appears in English. I think I can do it, but I'm not sure. I make a kind of backwards movement with my tongue when I say it, whereas an aspirated "k" would be more forwards. Or maybe I'm using a bit of my tongue that's further back, who knows. I can get a sound that's close enough, so that's fine anyway. I've also noticed that the Danish "r" is a more complex than I thought. When there is an emphasis on it, it seems to be pronounced more from the back of the throat, it's a little harsher than normal and is like a weaker Parisian "r". I can do the Spanish "j" sound fine so the "r" only takes a little adjusting. Finally, I've noticed the "n" in "kan" being dropped in a couple of other situations. This kind of shortening in casual speech made me think about English a bit more. It must be very hard for a foreigner to get used to all the different variants English speakers use. Perhaps every language is the same, Spanish certainly has a few, but not as much as English. Or perhaps I just haven't found them in Spanish yet. I actually can't remember the last time I said "I don't know", I always say "dunno" instead. And instead of "what do you" I say something like "whaja". We make our languages so hard for learners, don't we? :)
Still no sign of the dictionary, so I emailed them, and got a reply saying it shouldn't take that long (like I didn't know already) and to basically wait a bit more. Great, I thought. Out of the 650 odd words I've typed into my flash card program, I've done 500. Obviously I haven't learned them all, but at least I've been exposed to them. I'm noticing endings and how they compare to English, such as "lighed" which I think corresponds to something like "-ability" or "-ibility". It's also handy when a few different verbs have the same ending, such as "tage" or "stille" as it cuts down on the learning I have to do. I have gone through units 1 and 2, speaking along with the dialogues, and right now I'm trying to decide whether to start on the third one. I'm annoyed at myself for not doing this earlier, as I'm finding it incredibly useful. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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