Tag Archives: vowels
Danish for a Non-Dane Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Feb 28, 2018
A while ago a British guy in Denmark, Barnaby, kindly sent me his thoughts about learning Danish as a foreigner. Although I didn’t actually interview him, I’ve tweaked his most important points into an interview’ish text in order to make it more readable. What’s tricky about learning Danish? Phrasal verbs are tricky. Why does ”Jeg…
Strong verbs are not random Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Aug 27, 2015
It’s time to take a look at grammatik (grammar) again. (I bet you’ve savnet – missed – it!) If you … a certain kind of very active words, you can hardly … a sentence. In other words: Verbs are a necessary evil! :-] Kaja spiser en is. Per spiste en is. Ungerne har spist en…
Danish Oops! moments Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Jul 31, 2013
This month, several of my fellow bloggers here at Transparent Language have been writing about funny mistakes they’ve made while trying to communicate in a foreign language. As a native speaker of Danish, I’m afraid the bits I could share with you wouldn’t be very “juicy” – the few mistakes I can recall are all…
Danish Vowels: O to Å Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Aug 30, 2012
Yesterday’s trip through the Danish vowels continues… O Many foreigners think this is a U, as the two sounds are really close in Danish. The basic O is just a hair’s breadth more open than the basic U: to (two, pronounced somewhere in the middle of too and ”tuh”), skole (school). When short, however, most O’s open…
Danish Vowels: A, E, I Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Aug 29, 2012
Language geeks love Danish. They’re amazed by the fact that the language is full of strange vowel sounds, and that we Danes pronounce our consonants with so much ”timidity” that the whole language sounds like a stream of vowels (our a soup, if you like 🙂 ). Yeah, if you analyze it at scientific level…