The Easiest Things About Learning Danish

Now you may have heard that Danish is a difficult language to learn. Sure, it’s not listed up there amongst the typical languages in your evening classes such as French, Spanish and German. But that does not mean you can’t learn it. We are here to tell you that it is perfectly possible to learn Danish. We’d even go so far as to say we think you’d be pretty good at it. To give you a glimpse of how easy it could be, here are some of the easiest things we know about learning Danish.

There are around 6 million native Danish speakers in Denmark, as well as around 50,000 in northern Germany, so you won’t be lacking a conversation exchange partner. What’s more, Danes have high English proficiency, and can lend a helping hand should you get stuck.

Once you can speak Danish, you’re well on your way to fluency in Norwegian and Swedish as well since the three languages are so similar. It is possible for native speakers of each of these languages to understand each other well despite there naturally being a few differences between them.

If the thought of grammar makes you tremble in fear, Danish might be the language for you. With only nine verb forms, including the passive, a recognizable sentence structure, and a lot of Germanic-based cognates, it might be an easier transition than you think.

Danish uses the latin alphabet, with only three additional vowels (æ, ø and å). This means that aside from three new vowels, you’ll already know what to expect from the majority of words. Although the accent itself may take a little time to get used to, if you’ve dabbled with any form of language learning then the Danish pronunciation of the alphabet will not have any awful surprises for you.

If you’re the kind of person that abbreviates everything then Danish is definitely your language. As with all Scandinavian languages, the spoken language is heavily abbreviated in comparison to the written form. Take for example ‘What’s your name?’: the written form is Hvad hedder du? and yet the spoken is Hv’ hed’ du? Which means that one of the easiest things to do to pick up Danish is to speak.

There are, of course, the naysayers. Those that scoff when you say you want to learn a language. Embarking on any language learning is difficult enough without people pointing out that your chosen language is one of the more difficult ones to pick up. Well, we’re here to help. Danish is a beautiful, unusual language, full of richness and variation that you might not expect if you’re more used to the ‘traditional’ languages to learn. Contact us and see what courses we have on offer so that we can help you with your language journey. Good luck!