Archive for March, 2012
Seasons of the Year Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 30, 2012
Spring has finally arrived to Denmark at full sail; green buds are waiting everywhere to shoot from the trees and hedges. There is no turning back… Let’s take a break from spellings and tongue twisters, and look at the Danish årstider (seasons, literally ”times of the year”)… Forår is pronounced ”FORE-ore” in the British way…
The Danish Soup Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 25, 2012
For those who’ve come to enjoy the beauty of for example Danish poetry, the numerous comparisons of Danish with gray, grainy substances may seem a bit over the top. In fact, I suspect those dull descriptions stem mostly from Danes themselves. (Keeping an ironic, ”lowbrow” attitude can only make you pleasantly surprised when the prestigious speakers…
But how do I pronounce it? Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 18, 2012
So, as I’ve been trying to show you throughout this blog, Danish is fun to learn. It has a lot of colourful expressions (like tømmermænd – carpenters – for ’hangover’) and even some nice concepts not found in English (such as hygge). For an English-speaker, Danish grammar should be quite straightforward, and a lot of the…
That’s hygge to me! Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 10, 2012
Hygge is one of the best known ”mystery words” of Danish. It can’t really be translated. (My dictionary suggests ’comfort, cosiness’, but I’d say that’s only an approximation…) I asked some young Danish-speakers to tell the readers of this blog what hygge (and its adjectival form hyggelig) meant to them. Hashim I want to tell you about hygge…
Liking Things Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 8, 2012
Having touched the slimy subject of swearing, it’s now time for us to return to some of the more ”tasteful” aspects of learning Danish. 😉 The poet Halfdan Rasmussen, who has been mentioned earlier, once wrote a children’s poem about liking things, as seen from a child’s perspective. Fittingly enough, it concludes with the line…
Memories of Yesterday Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 2, 2012
This is a continuation of yesterday’s interview with the ethnographer Ulrik. Are the Danes living in the past? Good question! I think we sometimes are. I think all of us occasionally fall back in a kind of romantic thought about something that we imagine used to be, when everything was free from trouble. Some Danes…
Denmark from the Inside Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Mar 1, 2012
Ulrik, you’re an ethnographer? Yes, that’s right. I got my degree in 2006, after nine years of studies. I’m currently the leader of The Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård Museum in the Århus area. Did you make any fieldwork? I was in Egypt, in Alexandria, where I made a project about some Greek, Italian and…