Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| Message 1 of 31 04 February 2012 at 2:18am | IP Logged |
This is my Danish Language Learning Log. I've tried to start studying Scandinavian languages before but I've
never gotten far. I recently heard Danish and it sounded much more fluid and beautiful than I'd expect. I've never
learned a language before on my own, as Spanish is a school requirement (although I do enjoy it greatly), and I am
making some headway in French through sheer osmosis. The goal of this blog is to reach a level of fluency high
enough to read Hans Christian Andersen's short stories. I figure that if I can reach this level, I'll no longer be able
to put the language aside because I'll have enough access to basic literature to maintain it.
I started learning Danish as of yesterday (February 2, 2012) and I am currently up to Lesson 20 in a Mango
Languages program on Danish. I know that this won't get me far but I rather enjoy having the correct
pronunciation that the program offers as the many vowel sounds in Danish certainly will not be easy. If anyone has
any useful materials, advice, or commentary on Danish to offer me, I'll gladly welcome it.
As of now, the most complicated statement that I know in Danish is:
Det er hyggeligt at møde dig - It's nice to meet you
EDIT: I'm amending this log to include the TAC 2014 challenge for the Scandinavian Team(team name TBD). All of the TAC posts will begin on Page 4, log post 29.
Edited by Kartof on 21 December 2013 at 7:45pm
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a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5254 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish
| Message 2 of 31 04 February 2012 at 7:33am | IP Logged |
Scandinavian languages are one of the easiest to learn when you already know English - they got similar grammar, word order and many closely related words.
here are some resources:
grammar http://hjem.tele2adsl.dk/johnmadsen/Danish/danish.html
online courses http://www.linguanet-europa.org/plus/da/home.jsp
news in easy language http://www.dr.dk/ligetil
Успех
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Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| Message 3 of 31 04 February 2012 at 12:45pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the resources аЗ! The link on the grammar happens to be faulty; would you mind resending it?
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Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5346 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto
| Message 4 of 31 04 February 2012 at 1:17pm | IP Logged |
I'm always excited to see someone learn Danish, for obvious reasons. I just thought I'd
add a link for some resources.
Here
Also, you can find some of the stories by HC Andersen on Andersenstories.com. They have
the stories in several languages, and with occasional audio as well. There's a similar
site called Grimmstories with the stories of the Brothers Grimm, so that might be
something, too.
Finally, to go with some of this, there's a bit of Danish stuff on Librivox, eg.
Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
A na kraju želim ti uspjeh - Pozdrav iz Danske!
Edited by Danac on 04 February 2012 at 1:23pm
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a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5254 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish
| Message 5 of 31 04 February 2012 at 2:50pm | IP Logged |
Well, I copied it from an old thread from another forum. Now that I try to open it the site does seem to be down, there's nothing wrong with the link.
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Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| Message 6 of 31 04 February 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the resources Danac! And thanks anyway a3
Day 3:
I've completed around 3.5 hours in total on the Mango Languages program which is 29 lessons. So far, I have a
basic grasp on the grammar and some very basic vocabulary at my use. I can already tell that the pronunciation is
likely to be my greatest barrier to fluency.
I'm struggling to pronounce the "soft d" in Danish; is it pronounced like an /l/ as I think it does? The vowel sounds
seem to be almost as variable as those in English! One vowel is written, yet it can be pronounced as several
different vowel sounds. Are there any rules attached to this? As of now, I'm merely trying to approximate the
vowel sounds as I repeat them from the program but they probably all sound very off. Also, there seem to be
letters that are dropped in fast speech, like the some t's and n's at the end of words.
I always have trouble remembering the interrogative words in any language so I'll list the Danish ones here so I'll
have to look at them:
Hvem- Who?
Hvad- What?
Hvor- Where?
Hvornår- When?
Hvorfor- Why?
Hvordan- How?
Danish phrase of the day: Jeg forstår godt lidt dansk.
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Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| Message 7 of 31 06 February 2012 at 4:20am | IP Logged |
Day 4:
I have 4.5 hours and 39 lessons of Mango languages completed and I'm starting to search for more complete
sources and textbooks that I can rely on once these lessons are exhausted.
Through the amazing usefulness of this forum, I discovered how the soft d is supposed to be pronounced with the
correct mouth positioning and now I just need more practice to get the sound right. I'm surprised at how easily
vocabulary is sticking, especially conjunctions and the like so I can get the basic structural gist of some basic
sentences, without the necessary vocabulary to fill in the rest of the sentence however.
So far grammatically, I've learned the present tense and infinitive and touched upon the imperative and past tense.
Out of the top 5000 most frequent
Danish words list, I believe that I have the first 30 words at least firmly under my belt, and the rest taper off
from there on.
Phrase of the dat: Kan du gentage det?
Edited by Kartof on 12 February 2012 at 1:54am
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Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| Message 8 of 31 06 February 2012 at 6:47am | IP Logged |
I am extremely excited now that I found out that Henrik Ibsen, one of my all-time favorite authors, wrote in Dano-
Norwegian, essentially Danish. I really enjoyed reading his plays in English immensely, more than those of any
other playwright. I was planning to read Ibsen even if he had written in Norwegian but it makes me feelso much
better knowing that I'm studying the same language that I plan to read and not a slightly different one. Ibsen's
plays bring me such joy that I've decided to rename this log to more accurately reflect my goals: to read both
Andersen AND Ibsen's work. I'm ever more pleasantly surprised by the amount of high-quality literature written in
Danish and this will only serve to carry my learning of Danish further.
Edited by Kartof on 06 February 2012 at 6:49am
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