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A Visit from China Posted by on Jun 17, 2012

The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, just made his first official visit to Denmark. (The last time he was here, was during the huge conference on global opvarmning, ’global warming’, which was hosted in Copenhagen, December 2009.) Greeted by dronning Margrethe (Queen Margrethe II) at the airport, Hu and his enormous retinue (including several Chinese minsters)…

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3 Strange Friends: D, R and G Posted by on Jun 16, 2012

As you’ve hopefully learnt from the last few months’ how-to-say-it sessions, one of the reasons Danish is so hard to pronounce is found in the way vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø, å) mess up their neighbours. Let’s review: R after a vowel becomes a kind of British or sound, as in…

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For the Love of Books Posted by on Jun 13, 2012

Tucked away in an upstairs department with a backyard entrance accessible from Klostergade in central Århus, a lady and a black cat make a living selling bøger (books) in French, Spanish, Italian, English and German. I met them for a chat. What’s your story? My name is Geneviève Munck, I’m French and came to Århus…

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How the roligans got flabbergasted Posted by on Jun 10, 2012

”Og det var Danmark, og det var Danmark, olé, olé, olé!” And it was Denmark, and it was Denmark, olé, olé olé! The usual war cry of the Danish football fans didn’t cause the stadion (stadium) in Kharkiv to soar yesterday. According to the media, very few Danes had taken the trip to Ukraine to…

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The King, the Queen and the Doctor Posted by on May 30, 2012

What do you do when the king supposed to rule the country has gone mad? That question was haunting the court of Christian the 7th. The young king was obsessed by childish fears and lunacies, and displayed anything but a leader’s cool sense of judgement – to the great embarrasment of princess Caroline Mathilde, who…

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The Gs that Be Posted by on May 26, 2012

If the Danish R’s confused you, you’d better stop reading right now! The letter G is basically pronounced in three different ways: • As the hard G of English girl. This is the ordinary sound of G when it comes in front of a syllable, a T or another G. (If you’re not quite sure…

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Let’s Grill! Posted by on May 20, 2012

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…

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