Danes are amazingly efficient at teaching English in school. And young Danes are enthusiastic followers of British and American popular trends. Business and professional people must learn English or German, because so few of us outside the Nordic countries know any Danish. However, if you plan to spend any time in Denmark, it is very useful, and fun, and much appreciated, to have a basic knowledge of their language.
GRAMMAR At least for beginners, Danish grammar is comparatively easy. Unlike most other European languages, there are very few variable endings to nouns and verbs. For example, one word serves as "am, is, are".
VOCABULARY The English and Danish languages have a common heritage. There are words that are identical to English, such as give, have, and many others which are easily decipherable, such as starte and stoppe and komme. With a bit of imagination, you can figure out a lot more words, such as sygehus -- "sick-house", i.e. hospital. If you know German, you will recognize many Danish words with modified spelling.
DIALECTS Everybody teaches you the standard speech of the Copenhagen metro region. There are differences between the speech of the Jutland peninsula and that of the islands, but it is not an issue or obstacle for foreign learners.
PRONUNICATION Now comes the bad news. Danish is hard to pronounce. It has a feature called a stød, usually a "glottal stop" in English,
which does not come easily to most English-speakers. It's a hesitation in the middle of a word, and it matters. Unfortunately, at the time of
writing, the Microsoft voice called "Helle" does not always speak clearly (use an Apple device if you can).
On every page, you'll see the reminder:
This is a list of topics. You can try them in any order, but until you get used to this site, you should follow the sequence here. Most of them have continuation pages, which you should not visit directly.subject to change
Phrases