The Danish Language (IS THIS REAL?)
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- Опубліковано 28 кві 2024
- This video is all about the Danish language! 🔹 Learners of Danish, check out DanishClass101 ►( bit.ly/Danishpod101 )◄
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Creative Commons images used in this video:
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00:00 Our sponsor
00:14 General info about Danish
01:46 A brief history of the Danish language
03:59 Pronunciation: general comments
04:40 Pronunciation: consonants
07:13 Pronunciation: vowels
08:41 Pronunciation: Stød
09:40 Danish grammar
13:46 Verbs in Danish
14:49 Numbers in Danish
16:03 Closing comments
16:48 The Question of the Day
17:10 Danishpod101
Hey everyone! If you're learning Danish, visit DanishClass101 ►( bit.ly/Danishpod101 )◄ - one of the best ways to learn Danish! I'm an active member on several Pod101 sites, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do!
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great I've been waiting for a Danish vid 😎
You mentioned dialects of danish is slowley dissapearing.
I am half swedish and half danish and grew up in Sweden. My danish part is originating from the Copenhagen area. I am used to Copenhagen-dialect of danish.
I remember I was on vaccation in Copenhagen. I randomly had a convo with an elderly lady from Jylland. I am not sure if she wanted to be kind to me or if it was her danish dialect, but her dialect where so soft and melodic it was like talking with annother swede. That blows my mind. 🤯
Copenhagen-dialect is what most swedes thinks all danish sounds and makes fun of.
@@haddock4574 It's a low key diabolic attempt at killing the Danish language. Cancel culture! :-P
m.ua-cam.com/video/FqgRC5sfCaQ/v-deo.html watch this video for funny history about Danish😂👍
Hi,How similar are Indian and Nepali languages.
Im danish and I have no problem communicating with Swedish people, I just speak English.
I don't think a lot of people realize how common English is in Denmark and Sweden lol
It's bizarre how Dutch and Scandinavians can speak English better than English speakers
Thanks man cause I will need ages to understand Danish and planning to work in Denmark. Mange Tak.
LOL
@@72freesoul62 Oh you won’t have a problem, by far most people in Denmark can speak English, it’s mostly kids and elderly who can’t speak English, my parents are both 61 and can speak English (FYI I don’t consider my parents elderly) 😅 so even people at that age can often speak English, maybe not as good as people like my age (25) but they can definitely have a conversation in English
Me: born and raised in Denmark
UA-cam: Sooo, do you wanna learn Danish or what?
Me: yeah, why not?
Same here!
I am and also born in Denmark and live in Denmark
@@im.weird_so heeeeeeeeej
Haahahahahah same
Haha så er vi mange
In every language I've learned I always sucked at grammar and excelled at vocabulary and pronunciation. Then I encountered Danish and my world crumbled 😂
Ha ha ha. So true.
Then you should hear danish people talk other languages like Netherlandish or something else with the rrrrrrrrr trills
@@antonschacht8985 my girlfriend is danish, I have a lot of fun teaching her Spanish hahahah
@@Argenswiss lol
danish grammar is the wild fucking west, so many things we just dont have rules for that are like "just know it bro". its impossible to be confused because there are no rules to be confused about lmao. i feel like our grammar is designed to be as simple as possible to get into
The most difficult thing for me as an Englishman learning Danish is actually using it, Danes always say just speak English.
Pretend to not understand English 👍 that'll fix it
@@tobbcittobbcit8899 No dane would believe that if the commenter is under 60
I have the same peoblem. Im english living in denmark and when i speak danish, i normally get the reply just speak english.
@@therybes tell them to swallow the potato and just speak swedish
Pretend to speak only French and Danish with few and short phrases
"Pardon? Pas Anglais" 😂
I’m danish, and I finally understand why foreigners find danish difficult.
For Dutch speakers reading Danish can be learnt but learning to speak it is far more difficult.
Actually, it's just the first impression. When I started to study it, I quickly casted out my terror ;)
Although without large exposure to it, it's still difficult sometimes to understand it when spoken.
@@roodborstkalf9664 It kind of goes both ways ....
@@roodborstkalf9664 lol in denmark we have german as obligation to learn
@@musicforstudy1459 No we don't. You can choose between german or french.
20:05 “It's typically a velarized laminal alveolar approximant.” Ok, got it!
Lol 😂😂
Same LOL!
Fantastic lmao
French: WE have lots of vowels and very difficult pronunciations because we don't pronounce everything
Danish: Hold my smørrebrød
I wanna learn Danish do u have any suggestion?
Lol
@@withzeinab5519 Same way listen to music lots and read. I have so many Spotify playlist of whatever language. Listen and read. Read makes you learn grammar goods. Listen help with pronunciations.
Also reading is for nerds so never read.
means "buttered bread". also speed limit is spelled **inhales** hastighedsbegrænsning
“You are 1/8 danish. That meens you are 7/8 full of shit”
Dude i am dead LMAO😂
To take your final Danish exam, all you have to do is say "rødgrød med fløde" three times in quick succession.
Wish that was true XDDDD
Yes lets make a how to say rød grød med fløde time
I pass. Took me an hour.
Ja det er rigtigt XD
@@mathildemajlarsen4903 Vent kan man det? xDDDDD
I’m Danish and I’m in awe of myself having mastered such a strange language!
German guy who just moved to Denmark recently:
Regarding the grammar: This is very familiar.
Regarding pronounciation: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH THE HORROR
Been taking German for about 4 years now, German grammatics are hell
@@69sand no
Hehehe, Just be with danes alot! that's the best you can do to learn
To hell with german grammar :( different verbs depending on the subject.. kasus.. NO
I moved to fensburg and im im allready annoyed and it not even a danish city
As a Dane, after watching this video, even I am left with a feeling of: Damn, my language is difficult.
Feel you. Men så slemt er det ikke ;)
Nej så svært er det da ikke😂😂😂
Germanic languages need to update all of their spelling
Enig
@@shaide5483 hvad snakker du om? Vi staver ordentligt nice
I can tell you from my personal experience of moving to Denmark that the first 25 years learning Danish are the most difficult... ;o)
It gets better around 45 years in...
@@NicolaiDufva. Haha.
@eekamoose Oh really ? Crown prince Frederik's wife Princess Mary (An Australian born) learned danish within a few years. Alexandra (Former wife of Frederiks brother Prince Joakim) did the same.
So either you were lazy or just not good at it :)
@@uzurpon
A) Rolig nu. You need to work on your sense of humour. This was an affectionate joke.
B) You are wrong on both counts. I could speak Danish reasonably within a year of moving to Denmark in 1996. I did not take any classes and the only support I had was a good dictionary and one totally out-of-date book that still exclusively referred to the 'De' form. It was hard work but I read Jyllandsposten with a dictionary and watched the evening TV news with subtitles for hard of hearing almost every day. And I refused to let people speak English to me (those that wanted to). I still have a slight English accent but over the years people have sometimes mistaken me for a Dane or asked me which part of Denmark I come from, which has made me feel quite proud. I also feel very proud to have been granted Danish citizenship. I love Denmark, its people, its 'samfundssind' (community spirit, social solidarity), its culture and last but not least its language. Besides English and Danish I speak three other European languages fluently and have worked as a trilingual interpreter English/French/German in Germany. Fortsat god weekend :)
Uzurpon you’re such an ass
As a Dane myself I just wanna say that I actually just watched this video and expected it to be like many otehrs where I feel like they're making fun of our language and making it seem harder than it actually is. When I watched it I was suprised how good your explanation actually was and I also shared this with a friend of mine from England cuz she wants to learn danish.
I just wanna clear a few things out about some accents and the question at the end too.
We do have different accents, even among youngsters. If I would have to say all of them it would be hard as I don't even know how many there are, but I know the four that you can hear the most difference in when people are speaking it.
First of, if you're learning danish please don't be scared to try and speak it. Many immigrants mix a lot of the words up so it isn't grammatically correct all the time but Danes usually understand anyway. And the "hans" and "sin" part of the video, don't be scared you're gonna say that wrong either as many Danes do it too. I mix it up as well sometimes and I was born and raised here. So don't be scared, say something grammatically incorrect and mostly people would be happy to help you correct it. That was just my little motivation speach to the learners of danish languages.
There's "Rigsdansk" as you mentioned in the video. It's the most commonly used both In Jylland (Jutland), Fyn and a little on Sjælland as well.
Other than that there's also Vestjysk (Used by quite a few people from West Jutland.) If I had to describe it in one simple sentence I would say the danish cowboy language. In this accent some people say "møj" instead of "meget" and even for me who goes to school with many others who speak like that it was hard to figure out at the start why they sad that.
We also have Sønderjysk (South Jutland). This is the hardest, even for many danish people, to understand. I don't really talk to many people from that area but my dad works wit people from there and even he says that it's really ahrd to understand what they're saying sometimes even tough he's lived in Denmark for many years now and is fluent.
The last one would be "Københavneren" (or "The Copgenhagen accent") I'm not trying to make fun of anyone but if you listen carefully you'll often hear a slight difference when comparing someone from Copenhagen and someone who speaks "Rigsdansk".
Last we have your question at the end. As a Dane I would say I have some difficulty understanding people from Sweden and Norway but it's not a big problem unless they speak really fast as that's where the problem mostly is. If I speak slowly to someone from one of the other countries and them slowly back to me, then I wouldn't have much difficulty understanding them.
There's just one problem. In Norway there's something we Danes call Norsk/Gammel Norsk (Norwegian / Old Norwegian) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian). As a Dane it is much easier to understand Gammel norsk but when norwegians started speaking Nynorsk it suddenly got so much harder understanding them as there's some slang that we aren't used to and it's so much different than old Norwegian and Danish.
Hope this comment helped clear some things out. Some of this is my own and some other's opinion so if you don't like it please don't hate in the comments. Also if you read this whole thing, then thanks! Hope you have a great day/night wherever in the world you are!
best comment ever
As a swede I have encountered sönderjysk and I have had contact with danish thru a childhood friends father and my ex-wifes best friend being half-dane but raised in Sweden but speaking danish to her mom but that didn't help me with sönderjysk. Much easier with both english and german
Your comment about mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Norwegian sounded like me with Spanish. I'm Brazilian, so a native speaker of Portuguese, and Spanish is close enough for mutual intelligibility to be very high (despite a lot of treacherous false cognates, e.g. Portuguese "embaraçada" = "embarrassed" or "tangled", Spanish "embarazada" = "pregnant"). BUT this only applies to written Spanish or spoken slowly. If spoken too fast, I can't understand much. BTW, the same applies to European Portuguese, whose pronunciation sounds like a foreign language to us Brazilians even though the words are (mostly) the same. We have a hard time understanding people from Portugal speaking fast (the reverse is not true because the Portuguese are used to a lot of Brazilian music, TV programs, and soap operas, so they're familiar with our pronunciation).
I understand what you mean with the Norwegian language differences, but 'bokmål' isn't 'old Nowegian', 'Old Norwegian' is the same as 'Norse'. 'Bokmål' is actually norweginized Danish, while we had to use that while in union with Denmark for about four hundred years. New Norwegian was made to reflect dialects (mostly Western), that would be more Norwegian than 'bokmål', but the latter is far more used. While speaking, however, we use our dialects, mostly.
Completely wrong regarding “rigsdansk” - first of all there is no such thing, as Dansk Sprognævn doesn’t deal with pronounciation. As such, the definition that is generally accepted is that it is danish with no distinct hints to your origin. And danish spoken in Jylland and Fyn absolutely does not fall under that category. The generally accepted closest thing is a nordsjælland-dialect, which is quite monotonous. However, the fact that it might be considered a dialect itself, excludes it from the definition, hence why it is a non-sequitor to even conceptualize.
I am from Austria and completely fell in love with Denmark and it‘s language when i was in Hvide Sande last year. Very beautiful country and extremly interesting language. My main focus and project in language learning is Russian which I‘ve been learning for over 3 years now but today I started to learn a bit of danish as well. Its nice for a change to learn a language that seemingly consists only of vowels compared to the russian consonant war :) greetings to all danes out there from Østrig! 🇦🇹🇩🇰
Спасибо из Дании
@@LasseUJohansen хаха не за что!
Thanks for the possitive message and for being interested in our language 🙏 Tak ❤
Tak tak
Greetings 🇩🇰🇦🇹
When I defended my master's thesis this summer, one of the professors who graded it was Danish, while I'm Norwegian. When he told me my grade in Danish, I couldn't tell if he said A or E, lol (it was A, luckily).
Heh heh, I know what you mean. I wonder if that's why they give grades in numbers in Danish schools and colleges. I speak Danish very fluently and only have a slight English accent after 25 years living in Denmark, but if a Dane says one of the letters A, E and Æ, I still haven't got a clue what they said. 'Sagde du A som Albert?' 'Nej da, jeg sagde E som Egon!'
Your grade is Aladeen
@@winnerweiner5017 Okay, I see what Gravel Left meant. The difference between 'tolv' and 'to' in Danish is not difficult for me (now a Danish citizen but originally English) to distinguish, but then again I'm not Norwegian. Norwegians must think that every single Dane has just come back from the dentist...
congrats, so why a dane needed to grade you? doesn't it make it difficult?
@@winnerweiner5017 This was at a Norwegian university, and the Norwegian grading system (for higher education) is letters from A to F, with F being a fail, so I meant what I said.
Yaknow. I'm most likely never going to learn Danish, but I'm still 110% interested lol
i have this relation with a lot of languages especially the ones that aren't so similar to english
Same
That happens always! Watch any of his language profiles and you'll be like: "C'mon! I want to learn this language asap! This seems so amazing!"
@@LLWN84 lmao I bing watch Langfocus and other Language UA-cam. I'll spend a week on a language and suddenly have a nack for another. I've been switching between Dutch, German, and Swedish for a while now lol
@@FreakishSmilePA Happens most of the time with me too, lmao 2.
My husband is Danish, but we do not live in Denmark. I have tried to learn Danish on and off since we have met. My level of understanding is quite good, but I struggle with speaking as I find the pronunciation very hard(my native language is from the Latin family). This video makes me want to try harder and not give up on Danish.
20 year ago we had an American exchange student living us for the better part of a year. He was 16 and sat directly into a regular Danish 10th level class. After about three months he knew so much Danish he no longer needed help to do his homework.
@Oana Simion E ca un fel de franceză în ceea ce privește omiterea anumitor litere în vorbit?
@@dermeisterdesspiegels3518
E greu de comparat cu franceza. Da, omiți litere, dar felul în care faci asta nu e foarte precis. In franceză ai totuși reguli de pronunție pe care daca le urmărești vei ști cum să te exprimi. In lb daneză nu e cu reguli stricte, e mult mai fluid felul în care pronunți. Practic trebuie să înveți fiecare cuvânt cu pronunția corectă.
I'm Danish and I don't blame you if you give up on Danish when you basically don't need it. My bf is Finnish, and luckily he speaks Swedish to me, and he understands Danish. I refuse to learn Finnish, I will not learn a language that makes my brain hurt so much and doesn't sound pretty to me at all, when I don't need to! A few words, but no more. He doesn't expect it either, he knows I love Swedish and learned it for him. I draw the line at Finnish! Ps, hils din danske mand 😊
@@adday.
I do like Danish, it's not that, but for sure it's challenging to keep up with because I don't live there. I would aslo rather learn Swedish instead, it so melodious and seems easier to pronounce compared to Danish.
I worked for a few years in Finland and I really like the sound of the language, but I'm sure it's not easy to learn.
Tak for dine hilsner:)
Us danish people seriously love watching videos of our own country.
It's part of the low Danish self-esteem and these videos give us hope 😊
Ja vi gør
yup xD
@@superviewerHvorfor svarer du på Englesk?🤣
As a French person, I'm so glad to learn about a language with so more weird numbers than in my own language !
Et bien, en Belgique les gens disent septante (70) et nonante (90) et aussi dans quelques régions de la Suisse les gens disent huitante (80), donc on dirait que c'est surtout le français de la France qui est le plus bizarre, en ce qui concerne les chiffres mdr
Hahaha, C'est vrai
Mais le danois n'est pas si compliqué= avis, paraply, pause, parfume, kvarter, kusine (familie), etc... (Danish is not that complicated:newspaper, umbrella, break, perfume, quarter, cousin (female )...😉
Det er ikke numre det er bogstaver XD (it isnt Numbers there are just three extra letters sorry if i come of as rude here they are æ å ø)
And I gave up on the French number system, when I was trying to learn French (I'm Danish) Up to I think 40 or 50 it was ok, but after that... Nah, I'm never going to use higher numbers(lol)
It's many years since I was taught French so most of it is forgotten, because I don't use it in my daily life, although a few sentences here and there are understandable to me, and I can give a "Salute" to french speaking customers the few times they venture into my store/register, instead of a "Hej/hi"
@@emswista1157 Selvfølgelig /Bien sûr👍 æ= hiver, dés,chez, café-./ø = deux,sœur/[og/et] å=veaux ,eau, bureau;mon ami/min ven
Hold on a sec,
- Uvular rhotic instead of alveolar
- silent letters are frequent
- base 20 leftovers (forgot to mention those)
Let's see who you really are. *Removes mask to reveal French*
Ha. I just made a similar comment. You beat me to it.
The danish r was so much easier to grasp after studying a bit of french. But it's also somewhat similar to the "official" German r. Floating somewhere around those sounds.
Don't forget the weird 20 base counting system.
@@thebronywiking Even though most romands (francophone swiss) and waloons (francophone belgian) don't use it and use other words instead, e.g. septante, huitante or nonante.
@@thebronywiking Well that's not entirely true. By using septante (70) and nonante (90) instead of soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix Belgian French and Swiss French counting system is way more regular than the French varieties from the whole France and its former colonies (american and african). Some Swiss French dialects are in fact totally in a regular 10 base as they use huitante instead of quatre-vingt (80).
In practice, a lot of native French speakers are aware of those regular forms (and even the obsolete octante form for 80) despite not using them. Mainland French people not close to Swiss and Belgium frontiers may get a reminder of their existence when someone drop them into a conversation and they will just freeze for a second, but in the end they will understand.
im danish
born in denmark and curently live in denmark
speak danish every day
and even i found this confusing
same
Jeg mener det her altså jeg lever med de her bogstaver æøå hver dag
Me to or as i would normaly say og mig i forgart how to spell Åse meig
Jeg bor ikke i Danmark men i Ferioerne
YEET danskere YEET
Dane here: I have spoken with both nowegians and swedes, and everytime we have all just spoken our native tongue with only minor misunderstandings.
Yes that's my experiece as well. I don't understand every single word they say, but I understand the full meaning. Dane too btw :)
From looking at these videos, it seems English resembles Danish, Swedish and Norwegian more closely in both grammar and vocabulary than it does German
@@timothythorne9464 I've heard it put like this - Old English and Old Norse had a baby, Early Middle English. French kidnapped and raised it, and now she's a Germanic girl in French clothes that still tries to speak her language, but can't talk about complicated subjects without using some words that French taught her.
I can understand swedish but not danish. In fairness swedish is my fifth language.
As a Danish speaker, I can for the most part communicate with Swedes and Norwegians in Danish, if we all speak clearly and leave out most informal speech and/or dialectal features to our own speech. It's almost always the case that we WANT to speak to each other in our own languages, but when awkward situations happen or if we don't get something, we might try using words in the other's language if we know that they have a different word, or we just switch to English.
As a non-native danish speaker since more than 20 years, I can fairly well understand swedish, and a little less Norwegian - probably because I am used to speak with people from sweden who speak danish with a swedish accent. The sounds of swedish are just more familiar to me. But it takes quite some effort to understand swedish and norwegian (and some danish dialects) correctly. Usually, in sweden, I just speak danish to the people, and it goes quite a long way, for small standardized communications, such as in shops, ordering in restaurants, ask for directions, check in at hotels etc, but sometimes I have to ask to repeat. A full conversation in danish -swedish (or norwegian) is often difficult, and as I do not speak swedish or norwegian myself, I have to go to english. Swedish and Norwegian in a telephone conversation is also very difficult, and often I have to go to english as well.
Kannst du Deutsch verstehen? hahah just a joke,but in reality can you understand German?
Aleksandar Bakalov I can (to an extent), I study it at school ;) But if I didn’t, I think I would understand the very basic stuff and certain words here and there
@@m_eudk Thank you for the reply,have a nice evening ;)
Aleksandar Bakalov U too Aleksandar :D Oh and btw, are you German?
Man - I never knew Danish was that complicated .... Surely I would never learn if i didn't speak it already ...!
Cheers from a 70-year old Dane ......
I'm just proud that it's one of the hardest languages to speak and understand.
@@danbsj At least for English speakers, it’s a Category 1 (according to the FSI, which trains diplomats to overseas locations), meaning it’s thought of as a relatively simple language, compared to Category 5, like Arabic, Chinese & Korean
@@seid3366 Ha ha ha ha
You are welcome.....
Just go a head.....
@@danbsj Same for Turkish
@@danbsj As the first second language I learned, I don't think Danish is particularly hard. But if I had to learn Russian I would literally cry myself to sleep each night.
Understanding Danish as a Norwegian or Swedish speaker is all about exposure, especially at an early age. A summer holiday with the Danish cousins is enough to understand it almost perfectly. Speaking it without an obvious accent is very complicated, though; properly differentiating how A, Æ and E is pronounced in Danish must be one of the hardest wovel challenges in any language.
Danish is so casual that if you have even the slightest bit of spice in your accent, you're bound to make some words sound Norwegian to us XD
I actually never thought about how difficult our language is, it’s actually pretty fun and informative even tho this lays natural to us Danes, but watching this video makes you se things differently 😊
I'm from Schleswig-Holstein and the proximity to Denmark makes everything south of Hamburg feel like a different country. Hilsen fra Flensborg !!
Hej fra flensborg :D
@Лэонардо Куња Ja (yes)
Well as a south dane I would not say about 50% danish 25%% german and 25% "home made" but over time the danish and english world are getting more
@Лэонардо Куња It used to be Denmark there until it was stolen, like what happened in 2014
@@Markle2k
what happened in 2014?
Danish is a tongue twister, except it's a whole language
Im Danish, can confirm.
and as a fun fact: it is one of the only languages in the world where, conversation can continue while taking a breath.
I'm part Danish. And to me, Danish just sounds like one long flow of vowels with "consonnends" (messed that up so bad) and hay!, there was a t.... And on with the flow, no words, no stops, just a lot of sounds, mixed together, somehow conveying grammatical meaning and information 〰〰🇩🇰
I really sound like a yoga instuctor... Det er jeg elser ikke, men Dansk er en god relax sprøg (jeg sage jo jeg halv Dansk 😔)
I remember taking the metro in Copenhagen and hearing the station names called out... some sounds were actually _painful_ to hear, I'm not exaggerating. It made my throat suffer just from the thought of having to vocalise such a noise everyday
@@osasunaitor what cities were it?
A tongue twister, with a tongue on anaesthetics... 😊
I have been learning Danish for over two years now. No one has ever explained it better than you have in this video. Even the numbers are making sense now! Thank you so much for all the work you put into teaching us. You are a gem!!
I only recently discovered the origin of our names for the numbers - and I'm a Dane. The names never really made sense to me - but this video made it quite clear - and suddenly f.ex. halvtresinds-tyvende (50th) makes perfectly sense. Thank you! 🙂
@@ellenstergaardgravesen1011it’s like 3 - 0.5 x 20 or 2.5 x 20 right
@@Ramhams1337 the last one yes.
@@ellenstergaardgravesen1011 looked it up. it's the first one. it's the main number -0.5 like halvanden. is 1.5. the meaning is basically 2 - 0.5
@@Ramhams1337 oh I misread your comment. But yes (3 - 0.5) x 20.
I’m danish and living in Denmark. Thank you for teaching me new info on our language!
Jeg er dansk og bor i Danmark. Tak fordi du lærer mig ny info om vores sprog!
For me, Danish is like the French of germanic languages. It sounds somehow classy with a weird exoticness attached to it. You can understand some words with a suggestive accent but still, the grammar and pronunciation sues you, beats you up and leaves you naked on a dark alley
They do have a more formal way of speaking compared to norwegian and Swedish.
I wouldn't exactly say formal. It's like classy as in old poetry. Danish is the complex result you get when you mix Shakespearean english with Einstein's calculations and make it norse
I think that Portuguese is the Danish of romance languages. It looks so similar to Spanish and Italian, but when they speak it... It's a whole struggle.
The grammar of french and spanish is quite similar
They're 75% mutually intelligible in the other hand
french with english just 15%
Makes sense. But I still think that compared to Danish, Portuguese is a small little child. I've studied it for a while, most of the time, it's quite solid. And depending on the dialect, it's even easier. Brazilian Portuguese has had a lot of foreign influence, it's closer to Spanish than it's European counterpart. While Danish, personally, has given me a hard time, no matter the accent
You know your language is in a weird spot when Iceland Danish is more understandable than Denmark Danish lol
I would say it's quite a common thing. The American versions of Spanish English and Portuguese are also more friendly to learners than their European counterparts.
Brazil Portuguese is more understandable than Portugal Portuguese as well
trezapoioiuy - Very good point about Portuguese. I notice when I hear Portuguese from Portugal it sounds more harsher and difficult to understand than Brazilian Portuguese.
I see your comments offen
I believe the Danish they learn in Iceland is more for understanding Scandinavians in general.
I’m impressed at how accurate and detailed this video is. Well done. However, the description of the Danish numerals is a bit erroneous. The “half” part of halvtreds (50), halvfjerds (70), and halvfems (90) doesn't have anything to do with minus half of twenty. It’s to do with archaic pronunciation of 2.5, 3.5, 4.5 etc. In current Danish 1.5 can be pronounced “halvanden”, literally meaning “half second” meaning half way from 1 to 2. Similarly it was once possible to say “halvtredje” (half third) about 2.5, “halvfjerde” (half fourth) about 3.5, “halvfemte” (half fifth) about 4.5 etc. all the way and beyond 10. I recently stumbled upon “halvellevte” 10.5 in an old song. Even though these half steps are all cardinal numbers they are pronounced like ordinal numbers.
So from 50 the system is “halvtreds” (50) abbreviated from “halvtred*-sinds-tyve” (2.5x20), “tres” (60) from “tre-sinds-tyve” (3x20), “halvfjerds” (70) from “halvfjerd*-sinds-tyve” (3.5x20), “firs” (80) from “fir*-sinds-tyve” (4x20), and “halvfems” (90) from “halvfem*-sinds-tyve” (4.5x20). (The * marks a cut out from the root word) Note that the first part of 60 and 80 stem from the cardinals 3 (tre) and 4 (fire) the way they are still in use today. So the steps between 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 oscillates between their ordinal and cardinal spelling and pronunciation roots. That’s why (to the confusion of also many Danes) 50 is spelled with a silent d and 60 isn’t (the last part of 50 sounds similar to 60).
Hi! Im Danish, and I currently live on a School with both danish and norwegian speakers. It’s taken me a while to adjust to some of their soft consonant. Also, some of their “normal/frequently” used words are equivalent to some old danish words that I’ve only heard my grandma say. A lot of them tell me they find it easier to understand danish than it seems for us to understand Norwegian, but when they speak slow I follow most of it :-) thanks for the nice video!
That's interesting, because a lot of frequently used words in Danish haven't been used in Norwegian since television was in black and white. Reading Danish text is often like reading a newspaper article from the 50s.
Jeg elsker dansk, men jeg ved ikke hvorfor. Det er virkelig smukt, interessant og minimalistisk sprog.
Hilsner fra Brasilien 🇩🇰🇧🇷👋
"Jeg elsker Dansk, men jeg ved ikke hvorfor. Det er virkelig smukt og minimalistisk" you're on the right track held og lykke
@@TwinStrike100
Thank you!
Just fixed it 😁
Minimalistisk? Hvordan?
@@MikCph
Især med hensyn til udtale.
Men også kulturen "tale er sølv, tavshed er guld."
@@Yostheou Deep. But so true though.
As being Swedish, living my whole life just across the bridge in Malmö, and as a child having access to to Danish TV, I think that has been an advantage in understanding Danish. Today I have no problem communicating with Danes, as long as we both make an effort to speak slowly and translate words that are not the same in both languages. Often we are aware of these words that are totally different or even the “false friends”.
I have understood a bit of Skånsk from Norwegian. I assume that Skånsk is a Swedish dialect distorted by Danish pronunciation.
@@sandhammaren05 I think the Skånska you hear these days is more or less standard Swedish with accent. Sure, they have their own words, but I mean... as long as they aren't talking a strong dialect (I think mostly the older generation & farmers do that) you should understand them quite well. If you understand Swedish you should understand most people talking Skånska fairly easily after a few days. I guess it's comparable with British English vs. Australian English.
PS: The water in Sandhammaren was very cold this summer 😅
@@sandhammaren05 Actually Skånsk is a Danish dialect with Swedish influence.
And we love you too!! vi kallar fortfarande Ers vackra version av svenska östdanska
As someone from Malmö, can you tell me if the situation in TV shows like The Bridge is realistic? Where Swedes and Danes speak to each other in their native languages and understand everything perfectly? I've often wondered if it represents the truth.
Now i understand how difficult it is to learn danish, i'm from Denmark, and i had no clue that our language was so complex.
For any Dane who’s curious as to what Danish sounds like to those who don’t speak it, try listening to Dutch. The accent is the same, but impossible to understand
Yes. I've been in places in, like, Spain or America, and heard indistinct talking nearby and thought: "Oh, there are some other Danes there, cool. I can't quite make out what they are saying... oh wait, they are Dutch"
Actually... If you have some knowledge of English and German (like this Dane do), I will say that I am able to understand some 75 % of written Dutch without any difficulty. The remaining 25 % will require some contextual guesswork. As for spoken Dutch it is about 30-40 %, something that would improve dramatically after just a few weeks living in The Netherlands.
I noticed this too when visiting the Netherlands. It sounds practically the same, apart from some details - but it's complete gibberish (to the danish ear). :D
I flew KLM once. the captain, co-pilot and purser all introduced themselves over the speakers. They were called Hrrrrrrrr, Hrrrrrrrrr and Hrrrrrr.
The softness and not giving a crap about spelling is clearly related to French
This is surprisingly more than a meme. All of the West European languages went through something called the Great Vowel Shift a few hundred years ago, which is why English, French and German have so many mismatches between spelling and pronunciation. This change spread as far as Denmark but not really further into Scandinavia which is partly why Danish sounds so different from the other Nordic languages.
Dane here:
I don’t find a problem pronouncing French so take from that what you wil
French ? for real ? We(Denmark)have like zero
in common with Fance Besides some of our
royal family tends to prefer french
people as a partner :)
and in pure pronunciation it could hardly be any further from danish.
It is clear there are certain words that are repeated in Danish English and French etc. But it is probably because they all have Latin embedded in their language. And some words in engslish are from "old danish" like the word "window" and many others that are
originally from the dansih
language and not latin to make it even more
complicated :)
But French related to danish ? Not so much, but i see ur point :) In
my personal opinion is that danish can not really be compared a lot besides swedish, norwegian, faroese and icelandic. German language have way more in commen with the danish language then french btw, but there is still no way a dane and german would be able to understand each other without having learned some German or Danish at least. I hope i made it more or less clear for you how it is in
reality :)
@@talknight2 "The great vowel shift" specifically only occurred in English between the 15th and 18th centuries. Other sound shifts occurred to varying degrees in different Germanic languages and the phonology of French also changed drastically (as evidenced by its "historical" orthography), but these aren't directly related phenomena AFAIK.
@@rasmusfritzen2999 It's a joke bro :D
13:08
The “hans” and “sin” is something that even a lot of native Danes stuggle with. Usually you’ll learn the rule in school (that if the subject is the possessor, you use “sin”, if not, use “hans”), but many MANY people still get it mixed up
Også jeg :( men det er livsfarlig med "han dræbte sin far" og "han dræbte hans far"
Sometimes "sin" sounds like "din" when you are talking fast, so people tend to get confused I feel like xD
Men vi bruger som regel "min" og "din" uden problemer...
@@FoxyOnyxSheep That’s why I’ll pronounce the majority of consonants & speak slow
Det är lite intressant. Vi använder ju sin/hans/hennes på svenska också, men jag upplever inte att folk blandar ihop det här. Undrar var det beror på!
Almost 20 years in Denmark trying to speak Danish and still cannot get around using numbers correctly
its easy.. 2 comes after 1, 3 after 2.. ;)
@@slashv2 It is not. Instead of saying 21 as 20+1 you have to say it 1+20. So in English instead of saying twenty-one you would have to say one-twenty. 121 will become "one hundred one twenty" instead of "one hundred twenty one"
@@dkostasx heh oh i know, i was just making a stab at you for not "Knowing" how to count to 3 ;p
But to be fair sarcasm is hard to pick up in writing :D
I'm a native danish speaker so i can count to 10 myself without having to use my feets :D
@@dkostasx Same as you using the clock backwards, Practice.
Could you maybe make a video about how Danish and Dutch compares? I am a Dane living in the Netherlands and I have noticed a lot of similarities
De talen hebben zeker een hoop gemeen.
@@heethanthen Nej, vi taler ikke ens. Men vi har mange lyde tifælles.
@@jensstolt1656 funny. I speak Swedish (learned) and I understood every word of that.
Danish, how many vowels do you want?
aLl oF thEm
just 9 when writing, but we'll use like 1000 when speaking, it's up to you to differentiate them, because if you use the wrong you said something completely different. Good luck.
Try looking at Finnish haha
@@sebastiangade nah feck Finnish.
You could say the same exact word, and have it mean something completely different.
Skat - used to refer to your close loved ones.
Skat - means treasure.
Skat - meaning taxes.
Pronounced and written the exact same way.
@@mikejameson7678 it can be wirtten the same way but it has different meanings
( Fun fakt people like me who are from Denmark knows what '' skat '' means because of what other words it stick's too its another meaning of the word )
@@sebastiangade less vowels than danish.
Finally I’ll be able to learn what my Lego bricks are saying
Are you God? You are almost omnipresent lol
And if you happen to have a Danfoss thermostat
If your Lego bricks speaks to you, then you should get easy on the Cuba Libre. ;)
Shit! He found out our secret spying method.
“Leg Godt”
Dane here. I think exposure is really important to be able to understand other Scandinavian languages. In my uni program there has been a lot of Norwegians, so we got pretty used to understanding each other and changing words to make it easier for the other part. I think we quickly discover what words others don't get based on confused faces :) I lived in Sweden over the summer though, in Skåne, and though I can understand Swedish more or less if they don't speak to fast, that dialect really had me fighting to understand what was going on. It's getting better though, so I really think it's exposure!
I’m danish and live in Sweden. It took me about two months of everyday exposure to crack the code of how swedish works. From then on out, I was able to adjust my vocabulary and pronounciation to the point that, while obviously not a native speaker, I’m understandable to people around me. Which I absolutely was not in the beginning. As for understanding, I was raised with the expectation that I should be able to understand nordic languages which definitely helped me (I believe a lot of younger people mentally freeze up when exposed to the other languages, which is why they think they understand less than they’re actually able to). But it still took about a month of listening to unfamiliar vocab and set phrases before the fog lifted.
When I speak Danish to Swedes and Norwegians I can normally change my pronunciation in a way that they would find me easier to understand. I also substitute some words for Swedish/Norwegian equivalents. Also there are quite large accent differences in Denmark between Jutland/Jylland and Zealand/Sjælland (where the capital is).
...and that is not pronounced as Zealand or Seeland but as Shalen' :)
I’m a swede and when I am speaking with a dane or norwegian I often also change some words for example äta in swedish that means to eat I always change to spise when I am speaking to a dane or norwegian.
Kidney Failure fem og halvfierds = sjuttiofem
@@emilbozaandersson5776 Eg er fra vestlandet i Norge og seier også eta i staden for spise.
I just stick to my blekinge dialect when speakin to a dane and some of your immigrants in denmark think i speak danish (just as people in stockholm thinks...). And when i speak to people from stockholm i have to use english cause they don’t understand swedish
"Kamelåså?"
"Kamelåså!"
1000 litres of milk
Karamel sovs!?
Vi forstår hinanden ikke!
skulle du have mig en sligstejskåmske sykkelekugle?
And so f*cking whaat?
I live in denmark
I was born in denmark
And i speak Danish
This video: *pops up on my screen*
Me: what the-
Also me: clicks on the video
11:45 made me realize how weird my language is.
True😂
"there is far from being a one-to-one relationship between letters and sounds".
ha ha ha... This reminds me another language with germanic roots.
It's English, just in case you the reader didn't know.
That’s the Danish influence on English.
People speaking this language are unable to read normal words. You know what is "sbiiishiiis"? It is "species", a word frequently used in botanics and zoology.
@@kokofan50 It is the influence of lazyness in both languages!
SO happy that I learned Danish as my mother tongue, wouldn’t want to try to learn it, it’s so difficult.
Difficult is something else than uneasy.
Learn finnish, that's difficult.
I could listen to Danish all day and all night. Just the sound of it is gorgeous.
Wow, really? What exactly do you find pleasant in it? im danish btw
Dane here - thank you for a very informative video. I can understand most Swedes/Norwegians and be understood if both speak slowly. I've noticed it's seems more difficult for Danish teenagers (I'm 44). When I was a child we saw a lot of Swedish movies/series based on Astrid Lindgrens books. They were in swedish audio but retold in Danish (a bit hard to describe) and I'm sure I picked a lot of swedish up from it. I've read books in both Swedish and Norwegian too without much difficulty.
In this class the indefinite class takes the suffix *Minecraft villager sound*, and the definite class takes the *other Minecraft villager sound*.
I am Danish, born and bred in Copenhagen. Thank you for an excellent presentation of our language...
One of the Sounds that people from abroad often struggle with is the viwel ‘ø’ (oe). I practice Danish intro with integration citizens, like refugees. We try to sing the Danish homework, which seems to support the learning process. Gives us a few good laughs too ❤️❤️❤️
Great way to learn languages!
Nice job on your English, the only quirk I noticed is your use of "bred" instead of the more appropriate "raised"
That's really cool too! I always imagined that sound like the one in the English words "put" and "cook", but I don't know if that's really what it is.
@@infinite5540 "Born and bred" is a common idiom to British English speakers. Perhaps "born and raised" is way more common in America...
Sounds completely natural to me. Depends on who you're talking to I suppose...
kalimbaS Thank you
@moogsi "Born and raised" is common in America, which perfectly explains my ignorance, being an American that I am. Thanks for telling me though, that is genuinely interesting and made me smile 🙂
i am danish and after wathing this i realised, how hard danish actually is.
I'm French and honestly, I've always thought that swedish is even more difficult to pronounce than danish. Of course, it's difficult to understand but finally, the rythm and sound of danish remind me british english somehow
It's actually impressive how much similarity Danish has with German as well, many words you can pick out when spoken slowly and when they are written you can read a fair amount of it sometimes.
For sure! I'm learning German and a lot of the words in this vid seemed familiar!
Our upper class (royalty and state aparatus) spoke german during the 17th century. Before that they spoke French for a good while. So the german language (and even to some extent the french language) has influenced our language heavily. That being said, I can't help but to think that danish is way more complicated than german and french. There are just so many oddities that you just need to know/learn by heart, since they make absolutely no logical or grammatical sense.
My Swedish friends pronouncing Portuguese names with a Spanish accent.
Me: Guys, it’s not like that. Portuguese is to Spanish what Danish is to Swedish, we don’t pronounce everything LOL
Portugal portuguese though.
I love the sound of Portuguese - it sounds softer than Spanish
Edwin Hidalgo My danish friend once told me, -norwegian sounds like French, both languages are so peaceful and romantic. Nowadays i agree with her haha, P.d. I’m native spanish speaker too XD
Brazilian Portuguese is incredibly funny for us Spanish speakers, but by far the funniest thing is written Portuguese, it’s just incredibly funny.
Brazilian and European Portuguese phonologically might as well be different languages...
I learn Swedish and when I can read Danish most of the time because they are so similar. But spoken... bruh
There are some predictable sound changes, though.
@@Langfocus spoken Danish might as well be mandarin, even though the written form is very easy to understand
I am learning Swedish, but i can also talk sonen basic danish. Just speak Swedish and use danish tones
@@gamerpixels2374 I don't know how easy or hard Danish is to understand for swedish speakers, but as a Norwegian i find other, more distantly related germanic languages like spoken Dutch more intelegeble then spoken Danish. But that is just my experience.
I'm also learning Swedish, and I'm at the point where I speak it at a B2+/C1 level. Danish is _hard_ to understand, but you really just need to expose yourself to it more if you want to learn to understand it. There's a fantastic young people's news channel called DR Nyheder here on UA-cam that makes great videos about both news and things that have gone viral. I found that after watching it (with their provided Danish subtitles) for a few weeks I was able to start relying more and more on just the voice. Maybe you'll find some success with it too.
Here in Iceland, Danish is still part of the curriculum in elementary and secondary schools. We never really learn it though 😅 We should just switch it for Norwegian, that way we might actually have a chance of being able to speak Swedish as well.
I disagree alot of Icelandic people I've met can speak Danish. Most of them are trilingual
I disagree alot of Icelandic people I've met can speak Danish. Most of them are trilingual 😅
I've been doggedly trying to learn Danish using the duolingo and drops apps. I'm getting on very slowly, and when I watch Danish spoken in TV programmes I just think omg, I'll never get anywhere with it. However, through learning what I have done, it's so incredibly clear how close English is to Danish, with so many words the same or similar. I think the Danish characteristic of silent letters is similar to English, and we just went different directions from the same base. I won't stop trying to learn Danish, and I hope one day to understand and speak it in some rudimentary way!
I come from an island in Southern Denmark where we speak a 'language' called Alsisk, where words like 'jeg' (I) becomes 'a' or 'æ' depending on what town you come from.
And we have this little sentens only containing single letters:' a æ ø æ ø u i æ å' (jeg er på øen ude i åen) ( i am on the island out in the river)
And even people 50 km can have problems understanding what we say.
a dialect like Jutland (Jysk) and Funish from Funen ( Fynsk) Zealandish (sjællandsk) as Falster and also the Copenhagen one ;)
vi har en del dialekter, fjernest fra hinanden Bornholmsk, Sønderjysk og Københavnsk xD meeen de ligger ret tæt mange af dem dog.. Mojn Mojn! ;)
@@Marvinuser der er så dog også færøske (føroyar)
Der minder mere om Norsk end ris dansk
@@kalmarunions2115 helt sikkert men det er jo også en anden gren af oldnordisk, Islandsk er Norrønt hvor færøsk er dønsk og begge lyder som en pærevælding af finsk norsk og tysk, selvom færøerne oprindeligt talte samme sprog som os ;) meeen jeg synes nu at begge er nemme at forstå på skrift, men det er nok også fordi jeg har indsigt alle de sprog, når man kender til både Finsk, Gælisk, old engelsk, Tysk, Norsk og Svensk og visse slaviske sprog så hjælper det en del ikke ? :p
A Æ U Å Æ Ø I Æ Å ;) sådan skal den lyde !
Funny thing, in Swedish Värmland dialect this is a complete sentence: I åa ä e ö, å i öa ä e å (in the river there's an island, and in the island there's a river)
Danish is a beautiful language. English spoken with a heavy Danish accent, not so much.
English with Danish accent = Danglish = almost as charming as a baby goat trying to jump
Guilty
“Do you know where, øh, the togstation er?”
@Dalle Smalhals " Ama'rkansk " ?
Well - in my head it sounds sooo good - but when it comes out of my mouth, something strange has happend. Måske det bare er mig :D
I’m from Denmark and have lived here all my life. Jeg elsker at bo her det er hyggeligt fordi næsten alle er venlige🇩🇰🇩🇰
Ja Danmark er maget fantastisk
Interesting video, very informative. Funny how I never thought about the differences in how to build sentences in Danish vs. English. Great video!
I know the video is almost two years old, but I'm going to share my thoughts on your question anyway. How well you understand Swedish and Norwegian, I'd say it depends on your age, and where you come from in the country. For example, people coming from Zealand tend to understand Swedish quite well, because back in the days many would watch Swedish television. People from Jutland, seem to be way better at German, since many had been watching German television back in the days. Of course I don't state that it is always like this, its just something I have heard multiple times when discussing the subject with family and friends. I grew up in the 90s, and have not watched that much Swedish television, in school we had an introduction to Swedish, way too little in my opinion! I can somewhat understand it, I understand maybe about 80%. The same goes the other way, elderly Swedish people seems to understand Danish quite well, only had to speak English very few times, often when speaking to younger people in Sweden. Again depends on where in Sweden. Norwegian is way easier, it has more words in common with Danish compared to Swedish, where a lot of the words are different. I believe that most Danes understand Norwegian to some degree.
I can't get over how serious he is when he says "soft d".
F L A C C I D
@@masicbemester F R I C A T I V E
Swedes and Norwegians make fun of the silly Danish language.
Danes and Swedes make fun of the silly Norwegian language.
Norwegians and Danes make fun of the silly Swedish language.
We are basically just siblings teasing each other. 😆
I find it quite easy to understand Danish in general (I'm Swedish myself), probably because my grandmother was Danish, and we spent basically all our vacations in Denmark camping when I was a child. (Denmark was THE place for camping in those days 👍🙂. Don't know how it is now though.)
I think it's more about how far from each other people live than their main language. I mean, I find many Swedes difficult to understand, and don't get me started on some of the dialects of Norwegian!
In general I find people from København tend to change their pronunciation when speaking to Swedes, probably because they are used to doing that because of their proximity to Malmö in Sweden.
In any case, our differences are just as fascinating as our similarities I think 🙂
And don't forget about all the swedes that work in København. I'm surprised everytime I go there.
@@hin_hale Too bad you guys have to talk to THOSE people
Robert E. S. ahhhh stfu, why so toxic
Yup, I spent some summers in Denmark as a Swedish kid too, haha! A lot of camping and people just talking a little bit differently (but then the next year we went to Gotland, and for me it was just the same thing! ;-) Seriöst! Många gotländska dialekter kan vara svårare för mig att förstå, än vissa danska)
Yea siblings that describe it pretty well. When the countries where younger Denmark and Sweden fought like cats and dogs while Norway was in the middle. Then when they had grown older they calmed down and talked to each other again, and now have a good relationship (ish). If that doesn't sound like a lot of other sibling's relationships I don't know what will.
I'm a Dane and came here to feel better about myself
Hey that's great, someone need to feel better.
I heard we sound like dry gagging (like puking with no vomit) but to us we sound like angels singing.
it's much simpler when you actually talk the language. people will easily understand you if you swapped some words and you pronounced the letters incorrectly. immigrants in denmark does this alot and it is still easy for danish people to understand. and most of the people living in denmark are relly good at english
Once we were told to write programs using English labels and names rather that Danish ones. Well, even computer programmers are not that good at English - it got completely messed up. EG. "GemtAfdeling" - > "HiddenDepartment" (should have been "SavedDepartment" - for a variable). I just sad and stared - where was that department hidden and why? It should probably have been "Ward" rather than "Department". And "BorrowedBad". What? Well, the idea was that a BED had been borrowed bwtheen two sections of a hospital. It sounded like syfilis.
@@typograf62 lol dude, sounds like a pain in the ass
Word in English: fifty
Spelling in Danish: Halvtreds
Pronunciation in Danish: alsssaiais
Norwegian: Plain old "femti" (femtio in Swedish)
half-sixty
If they write alsssaiais they will pronounce it in diffrenet way 😅🤣
No, we actually do pronounce the H, so it's more like haltres, with stress on the last syllable.
When I was in Denmark a few decades ago, the Danish Riksbank wrote "femti" on their half-three-twenty Kronur banknotes. Danish numerals seems to be hard even for native speakers of Danish. "Femti" was immediately understandable as "five-ten(s)" to me (I'm from Germany). "Half-something-nearly-impossible-to-understand-and-spoken-much-too-fast" is cryptic and remembers me how French speakers are saying "Four-times-twenty-ten-nine" for "Ninety nine". Also with great speech speed, of course.
Which people ever counted base twenty in Europe's past, they created a lot of strange residue in some languages of today. I guess "base twenty" could be a good Langfocus video too.
As a Faroese person we usually have no issue speaking with Norweigans and Swedes, i think this comes from knowing atleast Faroese and Danish our vocaubalary helps. Another note is that since we are a much smaller country than the other nordics, we can't as much rely on only ourselves, and so many of us study/studied abroad that we kinda have to communicate.
On a third note us faroese have kinda developed what is either known as just scandinavian or blandinaviskt, which is a way of just jamming all the scandinavian words we know together to communicate with other scanics, we also utilise our "gade dansk" which is a way of speaking danish where you pronounciate all the silent letters.
And on a final note our television and raido isnt afraid of having other nordic people on and not having them subtitled or dubbed and just speaking in their own language.
No wonder many Danes cant even speak Danish properly.. Its just amazing how this Danish Language is the foundation for many many of the english words used today.. From the words husband and wife to a word like tide. It seems like Danish (going back in time) has had the largest influence on modern day english, more so than any other. That deserves a bit of Respect ;)
Almost like some of them went to england from time to time... Strange...
"Å, kamelåså!"
Jeg må ha en Kamelåså før min sygglekugle!
As a Dane, I can say that, in 9th grade, we are given crash courses in Norwegian and Swedish, just so we have a chance of understanding them, (or we were when I went to school, I'm old now.) Norwegian *Bokmål,* is so similar to Danish that companies put them side by side when printing instructions, on groceries. and I understand *Bokmål* almost fluently, I can't understand *Nynorsk* though.
In Denmark, aside from our native language, we learn English in 3rd grade, then in 6th grade we either learn, German/Spanish/French, depending on what classes are available at what school. so by the time we are finished with grade school (9th grade in Denmark) we know 3 languages, as well as rudimentary Norwegian/Swedish.
The stupid way our numbers are said kept tripping me up in math classes, so much so that I swap to English in my head when doing calculations nowadays.
and as much of a mess as Danish is, and it is, I can confirm it as a native speaker, I'm just grateful that
*Rigsdansk* is somewhat understandable, because my family are old farmers, and it took me 15-20 years to learn to understand my grandpa, I had my grandma translate for us.
Here is a transcript of something he said during an interview when the interviewer noticed his dialect:
*"Morsingbosk er no slæt æ så svæ, nå føst man fo æ læ! Men det ær svæ å forstå, hwans det betøjer når nur saje: "A wa på wej snek øve æ aj, da der kam en ærl"."*
And it translates into "Morsingbosk (his dialect) is not that hard to understand, when you've learned it. But it is difficult to understand what it means when I say, "I was on my way, quickly over the creek when a moose came by"."
I don't know how widespread it is, but many of my Danish friends with kids said that the school was using Norwegian counting words or "nissesprog" at least for the first couple of years, because "fem-ti-seks" makes a whole lot more sense than "seks og halvtreds" when you're learning a positional ten-base counting system.
I also noted that the old 50kr bill had the text "femti kroner" printed on it, but the new one doesn't.
I have no idea if it'll ever happen, but it would be cool if Danish switched
I'm a born and raised Morsingbo, and I can't understand Morsingbomål. So yeah, it's a difficult one.
Very interesting! And, I am happy that I understood at least a bit of your transcription! :-D When spoken, I might have understood 0% though! I try to "visualize" (audialize?) it whilst reading it, but I know that it would probably not sound like I imagine it.
I can also relate to the crash courses that you mentioned: it was the same at that grade in my school in Sweden: some Norwegian and Danish texts to read (but never much Icelandic... no wonder! The teachers would not be able to explain the grammar, hehehe...). I actually really liked those classes, but I wish that I had more of it. Those classes gave me a new perspective, but it was unfortunately very shallow. Just like: Here you see some Norwegian and some Danish. "Cool... let's move on to the next subject!" No real context, no language history...
Interesting. It's been a few decades since I have had the pleasure of the Danish school system, but you state that you're old, so I'm guessing you haven't attended school recently either. I have never heard of anyone in Denmark (until just now) that has been taught Swedish and/or Norwegian in school. Myself and - as far as I'm aware - everyone I know personally were taught German and English exclusively. That being said, I agree that Bokmål is easily understood, at least in writing, and I would argue that it is so by most Danish people. It's basically like reading something a Danish toddler has written. I would be comfortable reading a book written in Bokmål despite having never had any crash courses or such in it.
@@mcgreedz I'm 31 and when I say crash course, I mean 1 week for Norwegian and 1 week for Swedish, and it wasn't its own separate thing, but part of the Danish lessons.
I've studied danish for a while now, but just started focusing on the stød feature, something i just ignored on purpose in order to not over complicate the process, it really adds an extra level of difficulty on the extreme sport learning danish is.
Hahaha, very funny and informative! Alt det bedste!
In 1990 I was leaving Denmark after my first visit and wanted to take some spoken Danish with me so I bought a 'Den Bestøvlede Kat' (Puss In Boots) children's book and cassette tape (Lyt og Læs / Listen and Read) at the railway station in Randers before I caught the train south. The idea was just to have any kind of tape so that I could practise my Danish when I got home which was in France at the time.
When I got home and put the cassette on I thought that I had put it in the machine the wrong way round and was playing the tape backwards. I worked in a language school and you could do that with language lab cassettes. So I tried turning the cassette over. That just gave me the end of Side B. I realised with horror that what I thought was the cassette being played backwards was in fact authentic Danish being played correctly. True story. I'll never forget it. "Der var engang en møller. Og han var meget fattig..." (Once upon a time there was miller. And he was very poor...).
That was a hilarious story!
@@LarsPallesen True story, Lars. And somewhere I think I still have the cassette tape. It's funny to look back on it but at the time I was in shock for days...
In my experience, as both a native Danish and Swedish speaker, Danes really really try to speak Swedish when speaking to swedes, but are often not understood. I live in the part of Sweden that is closest to Denmark and here most people understand the Danish Swedish. In other parts of Sweden swedes usually just switch to English. Swedes like to mock the Danish language for, as you have said, their pronunciation and for their number system. When swedes from where I live speak to Danes they try to speak Danish and in other parts of the country as I said, they just speak English. As a speaker of both languages its really fun to hear a conversation between a swede and a dane here, because they're both trying so hard to speak the other persons language and failing greatly (:
Also when you speak both Danish and Swedish, Norwegian is very easy to understand and for me it sounds as Danish words with Swedish pronunciation, and with bad spelling
yeah norwegian really sounds like a mix of danish and swedish
En skåning som pratar danska? Det låter som ett bekant koncept... ;-D
@@bladimirandersson9191 hvaaaa???
@@bladimirandersson9191 okay lige maget
@@purplechips5251 Haha det var bara ett skämt som spelade på att Skåne var en del av Danmark förr i tiden :-) God fortsättning granne!
Jeg elsker dine videoer/i love your videos
Hahaha great intro and great video too!!
I'm Swedish and I understand Danish. I don't even live in the south! Meeting Danish viking reenactors is what made it easier for me.
And the answer to the question "What's the captal of Denmark?" is always a loud "Aarhus". ;-)
Ah. The capital of Denmark is actually Copenhagen. It is the largest city and it is the most populated one. Copenhagen is also located in "Region hovedstaden" (Region capital). Aarhus is the second-largest city, so I understand why you got it confused with the capital.
@@mulle2215 Not confused, that's what they say in Jutland ;-)
@@MartinAhlman Of course it is.... tsk tsk ( ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°) 😆
As a guy from Aalborg I will never accept Århus spelled with AA.
As someone who has been learning Danish (slowly) for years, this made me 😍. I love the deep dive into the language and phonemes. I enjoyed speaking along with the pronunciation!
I have found as a danish person that it is not difficult to understand Norwegian and Swedish in most cases, it becomes challenging if they talk very fast or have a thicker accent, but that is also the case in Denmark, if I meet someone from the southern parts of Denmark and they have thick accents, they become harder to understand, especially if they also talk fast.
I have met people who say they don't understand Swedish and Norwegian, but it feels more like they are telling themselves they can't and therefor don't even try and I have also met Norwegian and Swedish people who do the same thing.
It is really hard for me to grasp Swedish though, the tonal differences are quite dramatic and it's like the difference between french accent and portuguese accent imo
Hi, I can see that you are doing specific Nordic languages at the moment. I'm guessing that you might do Icelandic too, but how about Faroese? Would you be interested in making a dedicated video for Faroese? I'm Faroese myself, so I might be able to help with pronouncing words and sentences.
So, to actually answer your question for Danish speakers:
It depends on a variety of factors. Obviously, I can only speak on my own behalf, and I know a lot of people disagree with me on a lot of points, but for me it's like this.
Swedish is definitely easier to understand than Norwegian. "But Norwegian is just Danish pronounced weirdly", I hear fellow Danish speakers say, and yes. But also, super duper no.
I think the reason Swedish is easier for me to understand is that, while its vocabulary differs quite drastically in some places, the pronunciation is still closer to Danish than the pronunciation of Norwegian. I assume that is due to Danish and Swedish's shared ancestry in Old East Norse, whereas Norwegian comes from Old West Norse.
Either way, I also think it is DRASTICALLY reducing Norwegian's value as a language to just say that it's Danish, but pronounced weirdly. While Norwegian Bokmål is almost literally just the same as Danish, Norway has a wide variety of dialects of which a lot sound very different from """standard Norwegian""" (which like.. I don't even know if that's a thing? I know they invented Nynorsk to represent dialects in writing but???), or at least from what you'd imagine Bokmål to sound like (I'm really not an expert on Norwegian).
So that's a lot of moot points that don't really answer the question, so let's try with an example instead:
Last November I went to an international event, where I met two Norwegian people. On of them I could easily understand. She was careful about speaking clearly when communicating with me, and also she was from Oslo, which is quite important in this context (remember the dialect spectrum? Oslo is a little more than 300 km North of the northern most point of Denmark). She also had Danish family and so was extra careful to adjust her vocabulary when speaking with Danish, which is a point we'll come back to later.
The other Norwegian person is a VERY different story. I met him, learned he was Norwegian and was like "Oh, cool! We can just speak together in our native tongues then", only to immediately have to ask him to switch back to English because I did not understand A WORD of what he was saying. This guy grew up in Narvik, which is a town 1700 km north of the northern most tip of Denmark. He was born almost 6 TIMES FURTHER AWAY from speaking my native tongue than the first Norwegian person I met. I mean it when I say I had literally NO IDEA what he was saying when he was speaking Norwegian. Sure, I could tell it was Norwegian, but I would've probably understood more if he spoke Dutch, and I do not speak Dutch.
The same is true for Swedish. The further north, the harder it is to understand. But I do still think that Norwegian pronunciation is generally way further from Danish than Swedish, so while most people I know find it easier to understand Norwegian than Swedish, I, as someone who is both very aural but also have trouble processing audio (I know this sounds weird, but idk how else to explain it), find that Norwegian is my own personal nightmare - because people form Norway expect me to understand them and I DO NOT.
With that being said, most of the time Norwegian is typically a lot easier to understand in writing than Swedish, because Denmark was like "actually Norway is Denmark, here, have all of our words" and there you've got Bokmål. Bokmål is like Danish, but if the way you spell things actually made sense. Nynorsk is a bit harder, but still understandable - depending on which dialect the person writing it speaks. Swedish is eh. It's fine? Sometimes there are some vocabulary differences that make it hard to understand, but most basic words are the same and you can come a long way from context. Fun little example of that is when I was at a Swedish restaurant with a friend, and the waiter told us we could sit at "bordet bredvid blomman" (the table next to the flower). In Danish this sentence would be "bordet ved siden af blomster", with respectively "bredvid" and "ved siden af" meaning "next to". I didn't know the word bredvid, but it did sound like "bred ved" (wide at), which objectively doesn't make sense, but could be taken to mean me "along the width of" or something like that. It was easier to explain in my head, but you can't win every time.
Personally, when I talk to people from Sweden or Norway I make a point to be facing them and speaking clearly, because that's what I'd really like for them to do with me for me to better understand them. I also try to adjust my vocabulary, so for an example I work in a shop, and when telling someone from Norway or Sweden that something is 75 DKK, I'd usually say "syvtifem kroner" rather than "femoghalvfjerds kroner", because the former is how they form numbers in those languages.
That got a lot longer than expected, so I think I'll leave it at that for now oops.
Fascinating! I'm Dutch myself and can read Danish. Understanding spoken Danish proved much more difficult, but I can follow it quite well on radio nowadays.
Your number system gives me headaches.
As a Norwegian from Oslo I generally find Swedish slightly easier to understand when spoken, but Danish writing is ludicrously easy to understand.
"I think the reason Swedish is easier for me to understand is that, while its vocabulary differs quite drastically in some places, the pronunciation is still closer to Danish than the pronunciation of Norwegian"
When I read this I was like, "wait what no way!!!!". But then Skåne came into mind and I wonder if alot of the swedes you've come in contanct with are mostly from southern Sweden (Skåne and Blekinge). Because if they are then I definately agree with you that it is closer to danish. I mean it once was danish territory so the dialect is heavily influenced by danish. We even call Skåningar danes ourselves and if they have a very thick accent even swedes (from other regions) have a hard time understanding them sometimes. But anything above skåne is very different from danish in sounds. Probably why it's harder for you to understand. But you don't really have to go far up to loose that danish pronounciation. Just go from skåne to Halland and you probably think it's equally hard to understand a swede from there as a swede from the northern most part of sweden.
No native in Norway speaks Bokmål but it is closest to the Oslo dialect. Also I've found that Norwegians are the best at understanding the other North Germanic languages because they grow up listening to Swedish and the other major Norwegian dialects in media and thus are used to hearing a variety of dialects and sounds from a young age. Also because Danish is a weirdly spoken Bokmål to most Norwegians.
@@JohanHerrenberg I remember watching English shows when I grew up, with Dutch subtitles. As my English was not that good, when I was 8 (I am Swedish, by the way), I just read the subtitles, and got most of it! Ha ha! It just felt like Swedish with another spelling!
Along the lines of A. Lincolns speech: “4 score and seven” instead of 87 ...
Man of culture?
It’s backwards. Syv og halvfjerds Seven and 4 score minus half a score = 77 I added the spaces to the Danish for clarity.
there's like a trifecta of understanding in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, between the written and spoken languages.
As mentioned before in the comments, we can mostly understand each other, if we speak clearly, and not too fast. I also think the introduction of a lot of Swedish and Norwegian tv series in Denmark, over the last 30 years, has helped. I think it’s the case for all three countries, that if you get far out in to the countryside, people get harder to understand (in Denmark, an interview with a person from Nordjylland (Northern Jutland) often needs subtitles, for someone from Sjælland (Zealand) to understand it. And because the Scandinavian countries are some of the best non native English speakers in the world, we would, without hesitation, shift into English, if we didn’t understand what was being said. As a rule of thumb, people in Copenhagen are often better at understanding Swedish, and people in Jutland have it mush easier with Norwegian (probably because of the huge amount of Norwegian tourists we meet every year) (og til jer på Fyn, så fortsæt i bare med at spise runner med brunner, og brande H. C. Andersen)
I lived in Denmark from 87-90, I went to free Danish classes in the afternoon and eventually took an exam. I think it was called Dansk prove 2 . I must say it was quite hard to pass! This video reminded me of how much of the language I have forgotten! I also learnt to drive in Denmark, I had a little red and white book , with various driving manoeuvres you could tick off like , left turn and right turn lol
"I had a little red and white book , with various driving manoeuvres you could tick off like , left turn and right turn lol" - LOL that's funny as fuck, hope your little red/white book also taught you the groundbreaking manoeuvre "to break"!
People: *think french numbers are a mess*
Danish language: hold my beer
French numbers r logical to me up until 70
@@diouranke yeah, I was refering to that
@@diouranke And that is highly improved in some dialects. By using septante (70) and nonante (90) instead of soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix Belgian French and Swiss French counting system is way more regular than the French varieties from the whole France and its former colonies (american and african). Better than that, some Swiss French dialects are in fact totally in a regular 10 base as they use huitante instead of quatre-vingt (80).
The French number system is a math nerd's training spot.
1 to 16: not much to worry about
17 to 19: 10 (+) 7, and so on.
20: regular.
21: 20 and ("and" is a stand-in for +) 1
22 to 30: nothing noteworthy.
31: again, 30 and 1 (remember the "and one" exception goes on from 21 to 71, or alternatively, 60 and 11)
32 to 69 (nice): remember, nothing too out of the ordinary, apart from the "and one" exception rule.
70 to 79: 60 (+) 10, this goes on until 60 (+) 10 (+) 9
80: 4 (times) 20 (the exception to the unwritten plus, as it is a multiplication in the 4*20 scenario) (+) (number from 1 to 19) (also, blaze it)
And that's all you need to know.
Danish language: Hold min øl
As a Danish speaker, I am not good at changing my speech to make it easier for swedes and norwegians. However, I understand them perfectly well (95% of the time) when speaking (probably 99% when it is written).
The thing that has worked best for me is to learn the difference vocabulary and words that differ in Danish/Swedish/Norwegian (especially words that look and sound the same in DA and SWE but mean totally different things). Knowing the differences in vocab and slowing down my speech (and adding the swedish/norwegian word if comprehension fails) has worked wonders for me.
I am native german Speaker (and understand and speak also "low german"). In school I learned english, french, latin and russian. Later I learned esperanto, italian, tcheque, netherlands and spanish. In the moment I am learning danish (since one month). I see a lot of relations and words of low german, netherlands and english. Most difficult for me is the pronounciation words and to understand fast spoken sentences. The grammar is a bit strange but not too difficult. And I love to learn danish, because it's an interesting language.
How is it going so far? I noticed it’s been a year from your comment. What level are you at now? I’m wondering because I also started learning Danish two months ago, and we have almost the same language(s) package. How fast does it go?
Another great video paul, congrats on 1m subs, i watched your channel grow from small to large, it's an inspiration to myself and other creators
How to speak Danish:
Step 1: Phlegm
Step 2: Speak Swedish while hammered
Or alternatively: To other Germanic languages what French is to the Romance languages
If this method didn't work, sleep for three hours, wake up at 4 AM and try to speak Norwegian
@@gustavogiacomet4032 or better yet, walk an extremely long distance and run every so often, don't stop until you reach a border, then go back where you started, and Then you speak Norwegian.
Well speaking Danish whilst hammered is the most Danish one can ever speak
lmao
Sounds absolutely insane, yet beautiful in its own way.
Im a dane, and Im still impressed on how our language are. I can see now with video like this why it is hard for non danes to learn danish. But then again, for some reason, I never had so in depth teaching of danish in school. It felt like a second nature for me when learning it (Even if I have some speech problems because as a child I had a drain in my middle ears, so I often heard others like it was through a bottle) Other languages like English and German was hard to begin with, but I did slowly come around to learn them. Even through grammatic, I had some problems. Like you most likely had seen in this I had written now