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Scandinavian: Phonetics and Writing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| thephilologist Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5828 days ago 26 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Portuguese | Message 1 of 6 31 January 2010 at 8:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Never mind the usefulness of Danish vs. Swedish vs. Norwegian. How do they compare with one another in terms of how phonetic the writing system of each is and how difficult their sounds are to pronounce? I am considering learning one, and since there is hardly anyone to practice with where I live, I'd like to learn whichever one would be easiest in this regard. Thanks!
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5780 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 2 of 6 31 January 2010 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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As a beginner in Swedish, with a background in German like you, I'd say that you won't have many problems. Swedish writing is a little less straight-forward than German is, but it's not too hard to figure out. For example, it would be hard to transcribe some words if you heard them but hadn't seen them spelled before, but I can pronounce almost everything correctly when I read it now.
Swedish pronunciation is not hard compared to German, although you'll have to recognize some alternate pronunciations for some sort of retroflex n/t/d (or maybe "alveolar"? i'm not sure of the precise term here) when they appear in combination with r. -rt, -rd, -rn all remind me of some of the Punjabi / Hindi sounds. Some long vowel sounds can also be really harshly dipthongized, but it's not too hard to figure out either. It doesn't appear to be necessary to do so to be understood. The part that's more difficult than the raw sounds is the prosody and tones (ie, which syllables will be either long or short, and when will they have a falling or rising tone). This has been well documented in the writings of Olle Kjellin though, so there's nothing mystical there. Just understanding of the written description, followed by lots of listening and practice. I don't yet know much about Danish and Norwegian, but I would venture to say that they are roughly equivalent to Swedish in difficulty, which is to say that they're quite easy for someone who already speaks English and German such as yourself. I would propose that the defining factor for you should not necessarily be the relative ease of pronunciation, but rather your availability of learning materials or people to practice with. I personally chose Swedish mainly because there seems to be a bigger population, more electronic media on the net, and because Norwegian apparently has much greater variance in the regional accents. There are several other threads around about choosing a first Scandinavian language, so take a look at what the native speakers have to say there. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| thephilologist Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5828 days ago 26 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Portuguese | Message 3 of 6 31 January 2010 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you for your thoughts. I've looked through quite a few other threads on choosing a Scandinavian language, but haven't been able to find anything about how phonetic the languages are or the difficulty of pronunciation. As far as learning materials go, I have roughly equal access to Norwegian or Swedish materials, but can't find too much for learning Danish.
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| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5247 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 4 of 6 31 January 2010 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
As I'm a native Norwegian speaker, I can't really say which one of them has the easiest pronunciation for an American. None of the three languages has an entirely phonemic orthography.
Then I guess your choice should be either Swedish or Norwegian. (I suppose most of the matierials for learning Norwegian you've found is for Norwegian Bokmål not Norwegian Nynorsk.) Edited by tractor on 31 January 2010 at 8:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| oz-hestekræfte Senior Member Australia Joined 5472 days ago 103 posts - 117 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Danish | Message 5 of 6 01 February 2010 at 2:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well in Danish you dont have to worry about the tones, there aren't any. The most difficult parts about Danish pronounciation for me are:
A) Distinguishing between all the different vowel sounds. I believe the 9 vowel letters represent 16 different vocalic sounds. I don't know how this differs between Norwegien and Swedish. B) The glottal stop. (stød) It's not really that difficult to produce, it's knowing where to stick it. Other things that are tricky to begin with are the soft D sound and the back of the throat R, but both will come a lot more naturally with practice. A few words just aren't pronouced like they're written any more. eg. Mund (mouth) is really pronounced Månd. And "Nogle" (some) is usually pronounced "Nogen" But there aren't too many of these, it doesn't cause great difficulty. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 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 6 of 6 01 February 2010 at 11:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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Doviende has already given a good account for Swedish. I would say that Norwegian has two quite different official orthographies, and you can meet everything in between (and more) in the spoken language. So the main difficulty of Norwegian is the variability. Swedish has a few funny consonants, and it also has some dialects, but they are fairly easy to distinguish and don't mingle as much as in Norwegian.
Besides both Norwegian and Swedish depend a lot on speech 'melody' (more than on tones on individual sounds), and because that isn't indicated in writing you have to learn it by listening. Danish is different: the 'melody' isn't as clearcut as in Swedish and Norwegian, but instead we have a tendency to slur and cut out unnecessary parts of the words, which can make it difficult to understand for outsiders (even other Scandinavians). However Danish can be spoken in a clear and distinct way, and then our writing system is as phonetic as those of Swedish and Norwegian - and more phonetic than English orthography. Edited by Iversen on 01 February 2010 at 11:21am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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