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Archive for September, 2011

Learning Danish through English Posted by on Sep 29, 2011

Having a hard time learning Spanish? Wrestling with Chinese? Learn Danish! 🙂 Jeg er f@cking ligeglad med alt dit crap! I don’t give a f@cking damn about all your crap! Modern Danish slang sometimes sounds like a bad Hollywood rip-off… In Denmark you start learning English in fjerde klasse (the fourth grade), when you’re just 10 or even…

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September Blues Posted by on Sep 23, 2011

Whenever you catch a tog (train) or bus in Denmark, you are sure to encounter a number of people with white Apple earbuds in their ears, relaxing to much of the same r’n’b and pop music as the rest of the (Western) world. However, the Danes have a very rich song tradition themselves. While the classic vise/r ([folk]…

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Counting in Danish Posted by on Sep 14, 2011

Trouble falling asleep? Counting får (sheep) in Danish might just do the trick! For one thing, the Danish words for 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 are much less transparent than the fif-ty, six-ty, seven-ty, eigh-ty, nine-ty row of English – and so it goes when comparing them with a lot of other languages too…

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Talking about the weather Posted by on Sep 11, 2011

Danes love talking about vejret (the weather). I recently had a chat with a guy who’d been spending some time down under — he was really surprised that the Australians he’d met hardly ever talked about the weather! That made him realize, he told me, just how much people ”up here” discuss things like regn…

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Written Danish: a couple of quirks Posted by on Sep 1, 2011

When learning Danish, one of the most confusing things is the huge distance between the written and the spoken forms of the language. In a way it resembles the problem faced by people learning English as a foreign language, who have to get a grip on the strange fact that women in a queue is…

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