What makes learning Danish hard?

Let’s start with the more uncomfortable part: the ways in which Danish can be difficult to learn.

The top runner here: pronunciation. Danish has around 24 vowel sounds – but they are so hard to distinguish that even experts are unsure of the exact number. Getting Danish pronunciation can be a challenge – especially because you can’t necessarily tell how a word is spelt based on how it is pronounced. Doing this the other way round (i. e. pronouncing words correctly) can be learned, as you will see below, but it takes practice.

Some of the sounds in the Danish language are new to most learners – for example, the soft d, and then there is the so-called stød which isn’t even really a sound, but a kind of abrupt stop within or at the end of a word.

With so many different sounds, there is much room for misunderstanding: changing just a tiny aspect can change the whole meaning of a word. An example: mor (mother) and (mord) murder are pronounced almost the same since the d at the end isn’t pronounced – the only difference is that mord has a stød in the end. And, of course, there is a crucial difference in meaning.

If you are a native English or French speaker you might be somewhat in luck: You are already doing similar things when it comes to pronunciation. Even if your pronunciation is far away from the Danish one, you are used to knowing several different ways to pronounce the same letter. Like the a‘s in walk and cat – written the same way, but pronounced very differently! Still, though, you’ll have to get used to new pronunciation rules.

And then there are particularities like the numbers: numbers under 50 are pretty straight forward (10 = ti, 20 = tyve, 30 = tredive, 40 = fyrre). But then the number 50 arrives: halvtreds, which basically means “half-three times twenty”. So “three times twenty minus half of twenty”. 60, then, means tres, so just “three times twenty”. 70 follows a similar pattern: halvfjerds, meaning “half-four times twenty”, followed by 80 (firs = “four times twenty”), 90 (halvfems = “half-five times twenty”), before it gets “normal” again with et hundrede (100).

Depending on what language you speak, you may also be familiar with nouns having “genders”. In many languages (like the Romance languages – among them Italian, Spanish, and French), they can be male or female. Languages like German and Dutch even have a third one: neuter nouns.

In Danish, there are also two “genders”: they are called fælleskøn (“common gender”) and intetkøn (“no gender”). The difference between the two is that they use different articles and word endings. So for example, “a lamp” is en lampe (fælleskøn) and “a table” is et bord (intetkøn). The difficult part about this is that there isn’t really a rule to when a noun uses et or en. You’ll just have to learn it as you go along.

What makes learning Danish easy?

But when you look past the hurdle that is Danish pronunciation and pesky little rules, one thing you are left with is the grammar.

And now it’s time for a big sigh of relief: Danish grammar is actually really simple. For example, let’s look at verbs: In many languages, you have to conjugate them and know a different verb form for every pronoun. In English to be changes quite a bit: I am, you are, he/she/it is, we/you/they are. Or in German, there are even more forms of the verb to be (sein): Ich bin, du bist, er/sie es ist, wir sind … I don’t think we need to complete the list, you get the idea!

And in Danish? Well, you don’t really have to do any of that! For example, the verb “to eat” in Danish is at spise, and in the present form you just need to add an r to the end … and you’re set! Now you can talk about everyone who might be eating: jeg spiser (I eat), du spiser (you eat), hun spiser (she eats), vi spiser (we eat), etc… nothing about the verb changes!

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