Dansk

After four years of visiting Denmark, I'm finally trying to learn Danish. It hadn't seemed worth the effort before, as I teach in English there, and anyway, how likely was the school to keep inviting me back? Turns out, very likely, and as I like going and feel one ought at least to try to function in the local lingo, I'm starting on it in a more organised fashion than recreationally cross-referencing the Danish and English copy on packaging.

It's fun, and – for a language whose reputation is 'very very difficult' – so far fairly easy. I've also found that a tiny upside of having spent many young years in Utah, where my mum tutted at everyone's 'lazy tongue' when they turned mountain into mou'en and something into sum'm is that I'm taking very naturally to the wide variety of glottal stops that Danish requires of the hapless English speaker. This is not an accident, I think: there was quite a lot of Scandinavian settlement in Utah in the early days,* so I suspect the comfortable habits of the Nordic tongue outlived the taste for fish and minimalist interior design.

I first started trying to learn French so long ago that I've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner with a language; in my first few days with Danish I'm amused to observe that I'm coming up with all sorts of mnemonics which will be completely impractical in a conversational context. But I don't think I'll ever quite shed the impression that, in Danish, a girl is a pigeon (pigen), a boy is a dragon (drengen), a man is a maiden (manden), and a woman – any woman – is a queen! (kvinden)

Perhaps the reputation Danish has for being difficult to learn comes from the way the spoken word hardly resembles the written one – it could give English a run for its money. Pigen is pee'een, drengen is drain, manden is mai'n, and kvinden is kveen-n. The phrase Jeg er en kvinden (I am a woman) sounds more like Yerre kveenn. My first experience of this was when I was talking about words I'd learned off packaging and, in my obsession with Danish bread, one of these was wheat flour – hvedemel. One of the Danes present gave voice to it, and it came out velmee. I pity anyone who's tried to learn it from a book and then arrived in the country; they wouldn't understand a word.

I'm next due to teach at the end of November, and I doubt I'll be the least bit capable of conversation by then, but it'll be interesting to see how my experience of the place changes. I have learned what ikke means at last – it's a negatory – but Duolingo is insistent on the importance of my learning the word for 'plate' which so far I have been completely unable to remember beyond that it starts with a T.

But I know that you find pastries at a place called lagkagehuset, and what is necessary beyond that?

*and quite a lot of skin cancer there now, not coincidentally