12 Jun 2020 (Last Modified 21 Jun 2021)

Danish Language

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I wanted to learn Danish (and Icelandic) ever since I traveled to Iceland in 2018. (I traveled on WOW airlines a year before it imploded). I remember taking an elevator up to the top of the Hallgrimskirkja with a few tourists whose language I couldn’t place. I chalked it up to my lack of familiarity with Germanic languages.

Over the next year I started working on Icelandic. While reading Independent People by Halldór Laxness, I realized that the language I overheard in the church elevator was probably Danish.

Spoken Danish vs Written Danish Danish, similar to English, is not written phonetically. I found the YouTube channel, Mic’s Languages, helpful, although my audio comprehension still lags considerably behind my understanding of the written word and that channel stopped posting new videos around May 2020. NativLang has an informative description of the progressive loss of consonants and increases in vowels.

This blog post has good links to books in Danish on learning Danish. Saxo is a good Danish book store that ships to the US and provides e-book access for some titles.

I read Politiken and listen to their daily summary podcast, du lytter til politiken.

Inversion.

Subject-Verb Danish is a V2 language, which leads to inversion when the subordinate clause precedes the main clause. The second position in the subordinate clause is the first available for the content of the sentence because the subordinate clause must begin with a subordinating conjunction (like because [fordi]). It also leads to inversion when something else occupies the first slot in a main clause, for example an adverb(ial phrase) or prepositional phrase.

For eksempel:

1. En kat ligger på bordet vs. På bordet ligger en kat.
2. Jeg vidste det ikke denne gang vs. Denne gang vidste jeg det ikke.
3. Det var sådan i lang tid. I lang tid var det sådan.

Object-Verb This also follows from the V2 requirement. It is a way to emphasize the object.

Adverb-Verb In the subordinate clause, adverbs, including ikke, preced the verb.

For eksempel:

1. Tid, har vi masser af vs. Vi har masser af tid.

Resources I used:

1. Complete (aka Teach Yourself) Danish
2. Danish Tutor
3. Danish: An Elementary Grammar and Reader
4. DuoLingo: Danish
5. Tomas’ YouTube Channel

Words I’ve learned from Ligetil