Pølser i svøb and shishkebabber on the grill…

Parallel to the sweet strawberry season runs the hot grill season. Real men need kød (meat) – or so the joke goes. (Of course, there are plenty of vegetarer in Denmark too!) Nonetheless, firing up the grill has become something of an annual intelligence test for many family fathers…

For thousands of years, Danes have been placing a rist (gridiron) above a bål (fire) in order to prepare meat and fish for eating. During the last fifty years or so, the grill seems to have been imported from the US (the famous webergrill was launched in 1952). In a small garden, it is a lot handier to have an open ”box” for your kul (coals) than keeping an entire fireplace!

Although the word grill has come to Danish from English, it is pronounced with a Danish R and inflected like a common Danish noun: 1 grill, 2 griller. If you wish at riste (to roast) something on a grill, there’s a nice verb for that: at grille (to grill).

Once your coals are shining with hot, orange gløder (glows), the time has come to put on some food. An all-time Danish favourite is pølse/r (sausage/s). A pølse i svøb is a sausage in a wrapping, like for instance a piece of crispy bacon. (Yummy!) Then there are the traditional kotelet/ter (cutlet/s, chop/s), which usually consist of svinekød (pork) or oksekød (beef). Even fisk like makrel (mackerel) and laks (salmon) can be grilled with great success, even if that’s not so common among the majority of meat-loving Danes…

For the vegetarians there are many options too. Almost anything goes – from jorbær (strawberries) to melon to champignon [SHAMP-ing-yong]. Majskolbe/r (corn cob/s) are a modern classic.

Outdoor grilling is loved by many Danes, as it is a great way of combining leisure and eating. Families can be together in an informal way – the kids playing on the lawn while the food is being prepared. Friends can take their time discussing the latest gossip over a bottle of vin or a few cans of øl.

Happy grilling!

If there was a Miss Denmark contest for sounds of speech, the soft D (blødt D) would run off with the gold medal. Danes love asking foreigners to pronounce the phrase

rødgrød med fløde (which, as you may remember, means ”red fruit pudding with cream”). That’s four of the difficult ladies, lined up with exotic Ø’s and R’s in-between.

Well, they aren’t that difficult… We Danes like to think that our language is harder than it is – it is a way of keeping it for ourselves, I guess.
But really – if you can say the soft ’th’ sound of English mother, you can pronounce the soft D of Danish. They are both kinds of soft D’s, the difference is that in English, the tip of your tongue touches your teeth. In Danish, it should be a little bit more retracted.

Here’s a tip: Put your fingers in your mouth, with the nails touching the back of your upper front teeth (make sure you’ve got clean hands!) Now say the English word mother. Notice how your tongue strives to reach your teeth… Now remove your hand, and try to repeat the word as if your fingers were still there… If you’re lucky, you’ll catch a soft D with no teeth contact, and if you’re even more lucky, it’ll sound like Danish!

To many foreigners, the soft D of Danish sounds like an L. I’ve had pupils who pronounced the word Gud (God) like gul (yellow)! If you listen carefully, you’ll hear that there is a world of difference…

The soft D only appears after vowels, as in mad ’food’, gade ’street’, gødning ’fertilizer’. In most other positions, the letter ’D’ is pronounced as in English: dyr ’animal’, dreng ’boy’. After ’L’, ’R’, ’N’ and in front of ’S’ and ’T’, the letter ’D’ is usually not pronounced at all: vild [vil] ’wild’, jord [yoᵒʳ] ’earth’, land [lan] ’country’, plads [plas] ’place’, fedt! [fet] ’cool!’ (literally: fat!).

You can do better than these kids!

As you’ve probably noticed, Transparent is getting a facelift. All the blogs have been moved from http://www.transparent.com/YourLanguange to http://blogs.transparent.com/YourLanguage. The blogs’ design is being changed too. Don’t worry – everything is going to be just as nice and functional as before, if not better!

While we’re at it, here are some useful online resources for learning Danish:

• http://sproget.dk. This is the online dictionary of Danish. It’s backed by the Government and the Danish Language Council, among others, so the contents are top-notch. The homepage lets you look up words in several dictionaries at the same time. It’s a great tool to check spellings – but be aware that it’s all in Danish…

• http://translate.google.com. I guess you already know this one… The Danish-English-Danish engine has improved a lot recently, and gives some excellent translations. However, it still translates ”Hvor meget koster gulerødderne?” (How much do the carrots cost?) as ’How much does the carrots’ – so use with caution…

• http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html. Acapela is a company that makes text-to-speech engines… You type something, and the Acapela robot pronounces it for you! You have to pick a Danish voice in the list – Mette (female) or Rasmus (male). The quality of the pronunciation surprises me every time I try it. Definitely a place to go if you feel lost in the jungle of Danish sounds…

• http://www.dr.dk/ligetil. The Danish national broadcasting corporation, DR (Danmarks Radio), has made this online newspaper. Ligetil  means easy, accessible. The site consists of short articles written entirely in ”Basic Danish”. A good place to start reading the language.

I know a lot of you would like to watch Danish tv, but unfortunately DR has blocked its online tv from computers not in Denmark… If you’re here, though, you should take a look at http://www.dr.dk/nu/live#/DR1.

Do you know any Danish-learning resources not mentioned in the list? Feel free to share with other learners in the comments section!