Grænserne mellem dansk og engelsk
Sep. 9th, 2020 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinAs you know if you've been following me, I am learning Danish. I was surprised to find out, while looking for something else on Duolingo, that I have been at it for three years now! Granted, there were some long pauses in there, but I've been back at it since coming back from Antarctica and, as the mental bandwidth well has refilled over the summer, really applying myself to finishing the course.
For those unfamiliar with Duolingo, each lesson has five levels with varying numbers of exercises within them, each comprised of a set of sentences. The 'levels' don't get any harder, they're just repeating the same material – I suppose they've figured out that N repetitions is what will cement something in your head. Once you've done all the exercises in all five levels, that unit is finished, and you only have to do a refresher every couple of weeks to keep that achievement valid. I try to get everything up to Level 4 before moving on, so that if I'm feeling intellectually overtaxed I can go back and complete a known unit rather than trying to squeeze new information into my head.
It is still fun, and it's also a nice mental palate cleanser when preoccupied with other things (or a bit of productive procrastination when one's job for the week is, for example, taxes), but it's also been interesting to see how my ease with it rises and falls. I hit a tough patch a couple of months ago, where the sentences were just too long and there were too many new words in them, so I went back and focused on getting more of the previous units to completion. Then I started watching an episode of The Bridge every night, which is mostly set in Sweden but one of the main characters is a Danish-speaking Dane, and even though I couldn't understand most of what he said, just an hour a day of trying seemed to make a substantial difference in my proficiency on Duolingo.
That ended a while ago, and there's been a gradual tailing off in my proficiency since then, but I really hit some bafflement when I arrived at the Future Perfect Tense, i.e. describing something as having finished, but in the future. There seemed to be no pattern at all to whether one refers to something being in the past, but on a future date ('I have done my taxes next Saturday') or when one describes arriving at a state of being ('I am coming to have done my taxes') or a direct translation of English ('I will have done my taxes'). Usually the patterns and rules make themselves pretty self-evident in the exercises so I have rarely looked at the 'tips' for the lesson, but not making head or tail of Future Perfect myself I had a look this morning.
Turns out, Danish doesn't really do Future Perfect, so there aren't any rules for it. To paraphrase the Duo writers, 'We know you anglophones love talking about what will, in the future, be the past, so we've thrown together some guesses about how you'd say it in Danish just to make you happy. Oh and even though 1/3 of our exercises teach you to say "will have..." that sounds really weird in Danish and nobody actually says it, lol!' So I guess this is just a memorisation exercise and learning things wrong. I really wonder sometimes if they actually expected anyone to get this far through the course ...
For those unfamiliar with Duolingo, each lesson has five levels with varying numbers of exercises within them, each comprised of a set of sentences. The 'levels' don't get any harder, they're just repeating the same material – I suppose they've figured out that N repetitions is what will cement something in your head. Once you've done all the exercises in all five levels, that unit is finished, and you only have to do a refresher every couple of weeks to keep that achievement valid. I try to get everything up to Level 4 before moving on, so that if I'm feeling intellectually overtaxed I can go back and complete a known unit rather than trying to squeeze new information into my head.
It is still fun, and it's also a nice mental palate cleanser when preoccupied with other things (or a bit of productive procrastination when one's job for the week is, for example, taxes), but it's also been interesting to see how my ease with it rises and falls. I hit a tough patch a couple of months ago, where the sentences were just too long and there were too many new words in them, so I went back and focused on getting more of the previous units to completion. Then I started watching an episode of The Bridge every night, which is mostly set in Sweden but one of the main characters is a Danish-speaking Dane, and even though I couldn't understand most of what he said, just an hour a day of trying seemed to make a substantial difference in my proficiency on Duolingo.
That ended a while ago, and there's been a gradual tailing off in my proficiency since then, but I really hit some bafflement when I arrived at the Future Perfect Tense, i.e. describing something as having finished, but in the future. There seemed to be no pattern at all to whether one refers to something being in the past, but on a future date ('I have done my taxes next Saturday') or when one describes arriving at a state of being ('I am coming to have done my taxes') or a direct translation of English ('I will have done my taxes'). Usually the patterns and rules make themselves pretty self-evident in the exercises so I have rarely looked at the 'tips' for the lesson, but not making head or tail of Future Perfect myself I had a look this morning.
Turns out, Danish doesn't really do Future Perfect, so there aren't any rules for it. To paraphrase the Duo writers, 'We know you anglophones love talking about what will, in the future, be the past, so we've thrown together some guesses about how you'd say it in Danish just to make you happy. Oh and even though 1/3 of our exercises teach you to say "will have..." that sounds really weird in Danish and nobody actually says it, lol!' So I guess this is just a memorisation exercise and learning things wrong. I really wonder sometimes if they actually expected anyone to get this far through the course ...
no subject
Date: 2020-09-09 03:55 pm (UTC)Can you find any TV shows/podcasts in Danish for practice listening, possibly?