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AlOlaf Danish TAC 2015

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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 9 of 163
22 February 2013 at 9:10am | IP Logged 
I think it’s time to set a concrete goal for myself here, so I’ve decided to shoot for completing Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe before the year is out. There’s just one thing: After doing the first 10 lessons, I’m struck by how slowly and clearly the dialogues are spoken on the recordings. I wanted to see if the tempo increased later on, so I skipped ahead and listened to a few of the later lessons. It picks up some, but it’s still not nearly as fast and slurred as the spoken Danish I’ve encountered in films and videos. I’m wondering if it's a good idea to invest a lot of time and energy towards duplicating pronunciation that's artificially slow and deliberate.

FSI German, which I worked through and learned a lot from, starts right off the bat with a guy spewing rapid-fire phrases and running words together. At first, because the guy didn’t enunciate like a Shakespearian actor, I thought maybe the government, as a cost-cutting measure, had hired an inebriated street person instead of a professional speaker. My attitude changed when I went to Germany, where plenty of people spewed rapid-fire phrases and ran words together and nobody sounded like a Shakespearian actor. Hearing and trying to duplicate the language spoken naturally and at a normal tempo turned out to be good training.

On the other hand, I find the pronunciation of Danish to be much harder than that of German and understanding and mimicking Danish spoken at full tilt is, for me, a thoroughly daunting proposition. Out of desperation, I dug out my CD player that's actually a guitar trainer and can slow down recordings without changing the pitch. Using this thing and the free recording software Audacity, I recorded excerpts of the Harry Potter audiobooks and slowed them down to where I could really hear what’s being pronounced, what’s being left out and where the glottal stops are. I also put in response pauses so I can work on duplicating the vowel sounds that go by too fast for me to get at normal speed.

My question is: Am I going off the deep end here? This is only the second language I’ve tried to learn and I really don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I should be more concerned with learning the morphology of the language; it looks like the Assimil course will be good for that. It’s just that I have such a hard time reading something if I don’t know how to pronounce it.

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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 10 of 163
26 February 2013 at 8:49pm | IP Logged 
Okay, I'm done whining about Danish pronunciation. I broke down and got Pimsleur Danish this weekend, so I'm starting over at square one.
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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 11 of 163
06 March 2013 at 8:43pm | IP Logged 
I've been working on Pimsleur Danish for about a week now and I think I'm making some progress. The native speakers sounded unnaturally slow and deliberate in the first few lessons, but I'm on lesson 6 now and they're starting to blurt out indistinct, slurred phrases with pieces of the words missing just like I hoped they would.
1 person has voted this message useful



AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 12 of 163
18 March 2013 at 10:45pm | IP Logged 
I downloaded a course called speakdanish over the weekend and I'm really excited about it. The audio is crystal clear and responds instantly to mouse clicks; you can hear the native pronunciation of words and sentences repeated over and over, with no delay. What a pleasure, especially compared to some of the glitchy language programs I've had in the past. The course also seems to be laid out well. It wasn't cheap, but I've never been known to skimp on language learning resources.

I've begun driving around repeating after my Pimsleur Danish CDs instead of listening to German Harry Potter in the car and I've started back on Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I'm actually starting to believe I might be able to get somewhere with this.
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Fasulye
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2012
Moderator
Germany
fasulyespolyglotblog
Joined 5607 days ago

5460 posts - 6006 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto
Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 13 of 163
19 March 2013 at 5:44pm | IP Logged 
AlOlaf wrote:
I downloaded a course called speakdanish over the weekend and I'm really excited about it. The audio is crystal clear and responds instantly to mouse clicks; you can hear the native pronunciation of words and sentences repeated over and over, with no delay. What a pleasure, especially compared to some of the glitchy language programs I've had in the past. The course also seems to be laid out well. It wasn't cheap, but I've never been known to skimp on language learning resources.

I've begun driving around repeating after my Pimsleur Danish CDs instead of listening to German Harry Potter in the car and I've started back on Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I'm actually starting to believe I might be able to get somewhere with this.


Det lyder godt, synes jeg. Held og lykke med det!

Fasulye
1 person has voted this message useful



AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 14 of 163
19 March 2013 at 7:04pm | IP Logged 
Tak for din støtte, Fasulye!
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AlOlaf
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4908 days ago

491 posts - 617 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 15 of 163
01 April 2013 at 5:59am | IP Logged 
For two weeks I've been driving around repeating after my Pimsleur Danish CDs and it seems to be working.
I'm at lesson 15 of Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I put pauses in the audio so I can repeat after it, too, and now
it doesn't seem so slow to me. I'm also really liking my new speakdanish computer course; I'm on the third
lesson. Now if I can just fight off this insane urge to drop everything and start studying Icelandic.
1 person has voted this message useful





Fasulye
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2012
Moderator
Germany
fasulyespolyglotblog
Joined 5607 days ago

5460 posts - 6006 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto
Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 16 of 163
01 April 2013 at 9:59am | IP Logged 
AlOlaf wrote:
For two weeks I've been driving around repeating after my Pimsleur Danish CDs and it seems to be working. I'm at lesson 15 of Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I put pauses in the audio so I can repeat after it, too, and now it doesn't seem so slow to me. I'm also really liking my new speakdanish computer course; I'm on the third lesson. Now if I can just fight off this insane urge to drop everything and start studying Icelandic.


So bist du auf einem guten Weg, richtig Dänisch zu lernen, weiter so! Verlasse diesen Weg nicht für nur einen kurzen "Adrenalin-Kick" auf Isländisch. Mit Deutsch hast du eine Sprache systematisch viele Jahre gelernt, so solltest du das auch mit anderen Sprachen machen. Soweit meine Empfehlung!

Fasulye

Edited by Fasulye on 01 April 2013 at 10:00am



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