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Here's a little help for anyone learning Danish, pinched from one of my Swedish friends:-

"What people don't realize is that all Danes are linguistically psychic. They know what each other is about to say, so instead of actually speaking well-formed Danish words, they just utter meaningless gibberish to give their mouths something to do (and also not freak out foreign visitors). The last time true Danish was spoken out of necessity (before they became psychic) was in about 1850."

I can't find where he sourced that quote, but he then went on to show that the difficulty is real enough:-

"The main finding is that the developmental trend of Danish children's early lexical development is similar to trends observed in other languages, yet the vocabulary comprehension score in the Danish children is the lowest across studies from age 1 ; 0 onwards [this means one year, zero months]. We hypothesize that the delay is related to the nature of Danish sound structure, which presents Danish children with a harder task of segmentation."

[cambridge.org]

Okay - now for the help that I promised. After seeing the film Frozen, I decided to read the story it was supposedly based on, but it was soon clear that it had less than 1% in common with it. The film is far superior though, so this is no bad thing. However, I also wanted to read The Snow Queen in Danish, and I did this by comparing the original with a translation. While I did this, I combined them into a single file to create a more convenient parallel for other learners of Danish who want a gentle introduction to the language. Understanding the spoken language may be a nightmare, but the written form is clear, and it's so close to English that you probably don't even need to read through a language course in Danish before giving this a go:-

[dropbox.com]

David_Cooper 7 Aug 14
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Va Faaan!!

Charlene Level 9 Aug 14, 2018

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