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LEARNING DANISH

The seven stages of learning Danish every foreigner goes through

You've got your dansk ordbog, you've downloaded all the apps, you are ready and willing to learn Danish. Then you move to Denmark and reality hits. Optimism, overwhelm, delight and then over it: These are some of the emotions familiar to those of us trying to learn the language, writes Emma Firth.

Published: 31 October 2022 16:56 CET
Updated: 2 March 2024 06:19 CET
Girl with a textbook on her head in despair
How learning Danish can sometimes make you feel. Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash.

Stage one: Optimism 

You’ve decided to move to Denmark. You’ve watched The Killing and Borgen and can pick out the words ‘tak’ and ‘hej hej’, so you’re sure that within a year or so of actually living in the Scandinavian country, you’ll be sounding like Sarah Lund herself. You can’t wait to get started.

Tip: Hold onto the optimism because you’re about to have the shock of your life.

Stage two: Overwhelm

You arrive in Denmark, you’re overwhelmed by the next level life admin and you do not understand a word, not a word, of what is going on around you. You start to recognise written words while you’re out and about; ‘s-tog’, ‘gade’, ‘rugbrød’, but when you say them out loud, oh dear. You soon realise that you can’t learn Danish by reading it in your head. This is a language that needs to be listened to, at slow-speed, then de-coded, put back together and practiced. But you’re too tired for that because you’ve just moved country.

Tip: Enrol in the government’s free Danish language course as soon as you can. It will give you structure and motivation for starting to learn some useful vocabulary and vowel sounds. Duolingo and Google Translate are also your friends.

Stage three: Quiet delight

You’ve passed your first module of your Danish language course. You had a little chat in Danish and explained which country you come from, where you live and how many siblings and/or pets you have. This is it. You are going to be fluent in 18 months’ time (after Module 5). There’s tangible progress in your language skills and you are on your way to deciphering Danish.

Tip: Remember this feeling of progression and how good it feels because you’re going to have to keep it going for quite some time. Speak the little Danish you know, over and over again to gain confidence in hearing yourself make the sounds.

READ MORE: Five tips that make it easier to learn Danish

Stage four: Incredulity

You’re now half way through the language school modules. You’ve put hours and hours into learning this language. You know enough vocabulary to use in everyday life – it’s there in your head – you even know how to spell and conjugate the word. So why, when you go to say the sentence to the person behind the check-out, do they look at you in bewilderment and after another failed attempt, switch to English?

You start to feel like the hard work has been a waste, or perhaps you’re terrible at languages, maybe you’ve actually got an undetected speech impediment. The truth is, Danish takes a lot of hard work and practice to get to conversational stage. The vowel sounds are subtle and plentiful; the only way to master them is to keep speaking Danish. 

Tip: Don’t give up – you know far more than you sound like. Keep talking Danish wherever you can and push past those awkward exchanges, which unfortunately have to happen in order to progress to the next level. Force Danish speakers to stick to Danish, even just for five or ten minutes, or mix up a bit of English into your Danish so you can keep to the general thread of Danish conversation.

READ MORE: The best podcasts for learning and perfecting your Danish

Stage five: Reinforcements

The reason you can’t be understood is not you, it’s Danish. You realise that the language course alone is not going to make you fluent. You need reinforcements. You sign up to a language cafe, force yourself to listen to some Danish podcasts, start to watch more Danish TV and read some children’s books.

Tip: If you haven’t got a Danish person living with you, go and find one who will help you practice. There are schemes where a Danish volunteer can sit with you and help you practice speaking, or you can volunteer yourself in a local charity shop. If you have a cheerleader who reassures you that you can and will be understood, then you will get over that barrier many face after language school finishes.

Stage six: Breakthrough

You are being understood more than you’re not, you can read posters, apartment notices, letters in your e-boks. You are not so embarrassed by the vowel sounds coming out of your mouth and people are impressed you can understand a Danish exchange. 

Tip: Don’t take your foot off the pedal just yet. Keep going with the podcasts, the TV and the reading because stage four can and will still happen, and it can knock you off your course.

Stage seven: Acceptance

Despite your breakthroughs and miles on the clock, you realise you no longer know what fluency feels like. You will never sound exactly like a Dane; there will always be new words or expressions to learn; there will always be someone who responds with a “hvad?” to what you’re saying. But what you now accept is that this is the case with any language and we are all learning every day.

Tip: The more you use the language, the more you’ll enjoy it. One day, you may even find yourself sounding like Sarah Lund, to the untrained ear.

Member comments

  1. Brilliant text! Frighteningly and humorously true. It’s not easy to speak as a seals do (aka dansk) but for sure it’s encouraging to be able to “small talk”. Borgen is good stuff!

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DANISH HABITS

Hej hej, på gensyn, vi ses: How many ways can you say ‘goodbye’ in Danish?

There’s no lack of different ways to say hello to somebody in Danish, but what should you do when the time comes to take your leave?

Published: 27 August 2024 15:43 CEST
Hej hej, på gensyn, vi ses: How many ways can you say ‘goodbye’ in Danish?

As we’ve previously discovered, there’s a whole range of ways in which you can say ‘hello’ to someone in Danish, including hej, perhaps the easiest word to pronounce in the entire language.

So are the options equally plentiful when saying goodbye?

We’ll start with hej itself because, believe it or not, you can say hej and mean ‘goodbye’, even though it really means ‘hello’. 

You might feel as though you’re doing an impression of Paul McCartney, but it’s okay to say ‘hello’ when someone else says ‘goodbye’. That’s because the hej in this situation is not a regular hej but a contraction of hej hej, which actually does mean ‘goodbye’.

(As an even more confusing addition to this, Danish people also sometimes say hej hej when they mean ‘hello’… let’s not go there).

Hej hej is probably the most common way of saying ‘goodbye’ and it’s certainly the most versatile. If you want to be a little more formal or final though, farvel or ‘farewell’ is an excellent choice.

This word doesn’t come across with such strong old-fashioned, chivalrous undertones as it does in English. You can say it when leaving polite company at the end of a family event or dinner party, when exiting the office for the day, or also when taking leave of one or more people you don’t expect to see for a while. In a lot of these situations, though, hej hej is equally adequate.

If it’s late in the day godnat (good night) can be swapped in for farvel.

On the other side of the formality scale, vi ses or ‘see you’ is how most younger people take leave of their friends, especially if they are likely to see them again, well, later. That could be later the same day or in the same week, but in either case when you probably see that person regularly. It’s quite comparable to the Spanish hasta luego.

It can also be made more specific if you want to and if you are more sure about the time of your next meeting: vi ses senere (see you later), vi ses i morgen (see you tomorrow) and vi ses i aften (see you this evening) are just three examples of this.

You can also shorten it to a clipped ses!, leaving out the pronoun vi to context and thereby shaving a valuable fraction of a second.

På gensyn is a rather charming way of saying ‘until we meet again’, akin to the German auf Wiedersehen. 

You might also spot the word gensyn in the expression dejligt gensyn or ‘(what a) wonderful reunion’. People most often say this when they come across old songs, objects or other things from their past which they perhaps haven’t thought about for many years, but evoke pleasant memories.

Saying på gensyn doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be years until your next meeting – although it might be a while – but does convey your belief that the occasion will be a pleasant one.

What if you’re on the telephone? Danes don’t hang up on each other without saying goodbye (who does?) but they might express it differently than in an in-person conversation.

This most probably means a vi snakkes ved or the slightly stiffer vi tales ved (both ‘speak to you soon’) at the end of the call, sometimes rounded of with a short hej before the call ends.

More infrequently, you might get vi høres ved, which means ‘we’ll hear each other soon’ but serves essentially the same purpose as the other two forms.

Tak for i dag or sometimes tak for nu is a very popular and common way of saying goodbye in Danish, because it wraps up a ‘thanks’ in your departing greeting.

Say tak for i dag when leaving a birthday party, konfirmation or Easter lunch, or even your place of work when your peers or superiors are still at their desks, and your appreciation for the occasion (or your colleagues’ efforts) will not go unnoticed.

READ ALSO: Six ways to make a great impression at a Danish home

Sometimes, you might feel the need to drop in a hej or a vi ses i morgen after the tak for i dag, just to underline that you really are leaving now.

Finally, we come to mojn mojn, alternatively spelt moin moin. You’ll need to be in South Jutland to use this one, where the local dialect replaces hej with mojn in both the ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ versions (although you can still say hej if you want to).

Mojn is part of South Jutland’s regional identity, so using it in the right way can show your appreciation of local culture.

Are there any Danish goodbyes we left out of the list? Which ones are your favourites? Let us know in the comments.

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