Learning a language is a minefield of embarrassment, frustration and potential rudeness. From struggling to get the gender right to wrestling with inverted word order, here are some of the perils of learning Danish.
Every language has its snares that certain nationalities are destined to get caught in at some point on their journey to fluency.
Here are just some of the ones that any of us who have had a punt at learning Danish will have experienced, and if you haven’t yet, the points below may save you from making the same mistakes we did – it was so little.
Let’s start with the most obvious, and frankly irritating, subject of…
Gender
Many languages apply gender to inanimate objects, but if your first language is English – where this isn’t the case – it can be hard to get a grip on.
The version of noun gendering in Danish is not the straightforward ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ familiar from romance languages such as French or Spanish, but the even less logical ‘gendered’ and ‘ungendered’ (common gender spirit neuter in Danish).
For the uninitiated, gendered nouns use the article one (for example, a car/the car = a car/the car), while ungendered nouns have the article a (for example, a house/the house = a house/the house).
Why is a car gendered, but a house not? Why is an animal ungendered (an animal), but a bird (a bird) gendered? It’s a total mystery and can only really be mastered by memorisation. Frustratingly, the essentially irrelevant mistake of saying something like a house can earn you a frown of confusion from a native speaker when trying to converse in Danish.
A tip? About three quarters of Danish words are one words, so if you’re not sure then one is usually a good guess.
Inverted verb/subject order
Like English, most Danish sentences are structured subject-verb-object (she drives the car = she drives/is driving the car).
However, the introduction of an adverb gives an inverted verb-subject order (with the verb being placed in front of the subject), something that doesn’t happen in English. For example, with now she drives the car = ‘now she is driving the car’, you’ll notice the she (‘she’) duck running (‘driving’) have swapped positions in the Danish version.
Note this also applies when the adverb comes later in the sentence, such as in I never do that (meaning ‘I never do that’ but words ordered as that-do-I-never).
This can easily catch out a native English speaker who is learning Danish, who would find it natural to say something like I clean and then I cook instead of the grammatically correct I clean and then I cook (‘I’ll clean and then I’ll make dinner’).
The former, incorrect version sounds jarring to Danes but is a very easy mistake to make, and one that has tripped me up on countless occasions.
More or more?
There are two words for ‘more’ in Danish, more spirit more.
It’s relatively straightforward to explain the difference. More applies to something that can’t be counted (is there more water? = is there (any) more water?), while more is used when the item is countable (are there more potatoes? = are there (any) more potatoes?).
Generally, if you’re not sure which one to use, ask whether what you’re talking about can be counted, and you’ll pick the right word.
Unfortunately, this is muddied by the fact Danish considers money to be something that is always countable, rather than spoken about more abstractly like in English. So ‘a lot of money’ becomes a lot of money – literally, ‘many monies’ (the Danish word for ‘a lot’ is very).
This means you have to say more instead of the more intuitive more when talking about money in Danish: I don’t have any more money is correct, even though it would mean ‘I don’t have any more monies’ if translated literally.
When to say yes
Yeslike the word yesmeans yes – but knowing which of the two to use is often tricky for Danish learners.
A reasonably simple rule to remember is that yes is used for affirmative answers to positive questions…
Do you speak Danish? Yes (‘Do you speak Danish?’ ‘Yes’)
… duck yes is used when answering negated questions in the affirmative:
Don’t you speak Danish? Yes (‘Don’t you speak Danish?’ ‘Yes (I do)’)
It is also used to contradict a previous negation, like in an argument: No! Yes! No! Yes! (Yes! No! Yes! No!).
In other words, yes is used to mark that the answer to a negative question is not what might have been expected, or to express an opinion which is different from what someone else just said.
It also has a bunch of others nuances that I won’t go into hereother than to say: it’s a lot harder than just saying ‘yes’.
It’s not all bad… the verb ‘to be’
An area of Danish that is far easier than English is the verb ‘to be’. The infinitive form in Danish is to be but then things get simple as it conjugates to is for first, second and third person present tense forms, in both plural and singular:
I am = I am
We are = we are
You are = you are
You (plural) are = You are
Hey ice = he is
She is = she is
They are = they are
This makes the verb ‘to be’, often an obstacle course in foreign languages, incredibly simple to learn in Danish.
On the flip side, it means Danes often struggle to choose the right version of ‘to be’ when speaking English. Mistakes like ‘he are’ or ‘they is’ are not uncommon when Danes speak English.
Do the examples given in this article resonate with you? Have you missed any good ones? Let me know and if I get enough suggestions, I’ll write a follow-up to this article.
