# Danish pronunciation



## xBlackWolfx

I'm interested in learning Danish because from what I've seen the grammar is rather simple and I'm interested in learning more about the Danes, but I can't figure out for the life of me how to pronounce this language. I am already fluent in German (and I study linguistics with sort of a specialty in phonology, the study of the sounds used in a language) so figuring out the phonemes isn't much of a challenge, but problem is every recording I hear sounds nothing like what the text says. 

Here's an example of one of the things I'm listening to: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/danish.htm. I have read that Danes slur their words like this, but is it seriously this casual? She doesn't even appear to be pronouncing the last syllable of some of the words. Even French sounds clearer than this, and I've never been able to learn that either! Not that I'm insulting the language, English spelling is atrocious beyond all reason, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't figure out how to pronounce anything and I can't even learn to understand anything I hear!

Can anyone offer me help?


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## alexpayne_uk

haha Danish is pretty funny but there's not much that you can do about it other than get your ears used to it by listening to people speaking. Saying that, Danish pronunciation might be easier than you first realise, parts of it sometimes sound like some of the accents we have here in the North of England (...sometimes lol).

Also, I may be completely wrong with this so maybe a Dane can clarify, but aren't there some dialects of Danish that don't have the glottal stop? They might be easier to understand, but I don't know if there's much point in learning a certain dialect when you can't understand standard Danish.

Good luck anyway

p.s Youtube 'rød grød med fløde' lol...


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## xBlackWolfx

Actually to me, her words sound mostly like random gargling. The only part of her sentence i can make out is 'Alle menesker' which me to me sounds like 'all menskuh'. Some of the words don't even sound like words to me, that's the problem.


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## alexpayne_uk

haha ahh okay. I don't actually find it that hard to follow, and to be fair, I think it's more regular than English, you just have to be aware of the glottal stops. Why don't you try Norwegian or Swedish? You'll probably find them much easier with regards to pronunciation.


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## alexpayne_uk

<Moderator edit:>
As YouTube links are not allowed on the forum, I had to delete it. However, since the Danes have declared it linguistically inaccurate and there are so many references to it in the thread already, I want to make it clear that the link pointed to the Norwegian comedy show 'Uti vår hage' about Danish.


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## hanne

There's nothing wrong with the pronunciation on that omniglot link.

Danish does have a huge gap between spelling and pronunciation, but I believe there _are_ some rules that'll help you figure out which sound corresponds to which set of letters. I wouldn't use the words "slur" or "casual" about it, it's not like it's random which syllables can be reduced or left out (that might be just a problem with my interpretation of the words "slur" and "casual" ).

She isn't actually leaving out the endings - that would sound differently, and be wrong - but endings have a habit of somehow affecting (extending) the penultimate syllable, instead of being pronounced on their own in the end. Like the first word "alle", the "l" sounds quite long, which it wouldn't if there hadn't been an e on the end. You get the same in "mennesker", where the second e doesn't really sound by itself, but makes the preceding n longer. And what you write as "uh" is a common way of pronouncing final "-er".

Not sure if this has made you run away screaming. Obviously, I'm no expert on the rules for pronunciation, I only know how it works in practice, but have been saved the trouble of learning them explicitly . As Alex suggests, there are dialects that don't use the glottal stop, but as he says it seems a bit strange to focus on one dialect (besides you'd be unable to find _any_ learning material on that) and I don't think that's your main problem right now anyway .

@alex, be aware that posting video links is not allowed according to forum rules. Besides, the one you posted isn't funny, it's just wrong.


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## Havfruen

@blackwolf, I found this link on the page you posted http://www.speakdanish.dk/ with many audio files. Thanks, I found it useful to practice my pronunciation. My advice is to listen as much as you can to the language and practice imitating the sounds.

On the plus side the grammar is not too complicated and the vocabulary has cognates with English, German, and French.

Note that the actor in the Youtube video is not actually speaking Danish, it's a made-up nonsense language as a joke. I agree with Hanne, don't listen to that to learn the language!

This site has links to audio clips of dialects. Compared with those, standard Danish is easy http://dialekt.ku.dk/dialekter/lyt_til_dialekt/


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## xBlackWolfx

'Slur' means you essentially pronounce what would normally be two or more syllables as one syllable. Danish does do this alot from what I'm told. But I believe 'slurring' is completely random. There is no set way to specifically 'slur' two words or multiple syllables together, it's just how it randomly comes out. Maybe Danish does have some sort of restrictions on how this can occur but I don't really know.

The -er being pronounced as 'uh' isn't much a surprise to me by the way, German does the exact same thing. I didn't even notice it much.

What I'm used to is languages like German and Spanish with very precise pronunciation rules with little to no exceptions. But Danish obviously doesn't work like that, in fact some words appear to have different pronunciations from sentence to sentence.

For example on this website: http://www.speakdanish.dk/en/index.php, the word 'Hvad' seems to be pronounced several different ways, including as 'vahl', 'vah', and 'vaa' (a like in English 'can'). It may sound normal to native Speakers (perhaps they don't actually hear any difference between the three words) but since it's not normal for my language is stands out quite a lot and makes the words sound completely different from each other. This is actually a fairly common phenomenon in languages, but it'd take me all day to explain it.

That site i just linked to is actually helping me quite a bit, I'm actually starting to learn to recognize certain sentences, though it's more from the rythmn and tone of the sentences rather than the sounds that make them up. I'm getting confused on a few things on the next page though, 'mig' seems to be pronounced interchangebly as 'miy' and 'migh'. Does this actually have any significance in meaning? And they do sound like they're leaving out words here and there. The sentence 'Jeg hedder John' sounds to me like 'yeh-uh John'. It's actually frustrating and sort of embarrassing that I can't even hear half the words. And what's worse 'jeg' seems to have varied pronunciations like 'mig' does, but in the case of 'jeg' it appears to be just assimilation with the following vowel. In case you don't know, assimilation is a linguistic term for when a certain sound changes to something else when right next to another specific sound. Alot of languages do this, in particular ones that allow lots of compound words like Japanese (in Japanese assimilation is everywhere, you almost hear the assimilated word more often than the normal one). Or languages with lot of consonant clusters, such as the Germanic languages (which includes Danish and English, along with German and Swedish and Norwegian, the list goes on...).

I'm trying not to insult the language since I'm certain most people wouldn't like hearing that their language sounds like random gargling noises, but Danish honestly does to me. I'm sorry.


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## Havfruen

xBlackWolfx said:


> The sentence 'Jeg hedder John' sounds to me like 'yeh-uh John'.



I hear 4 distinct syllables. You have to train your ears.


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## alexpayne_uk

hanne said:


> There's nothing wrong with the pronunciation on that omniglot link.
> 
> Danish does have a huge gap between spelling and pronunciation, but I believe there _are_ some rules that'll help you figure out which sound corresponds to which set of letters. I wouldn't use the words "slur" or "casual" about it, it's not like it's random which syllables can be reduced or left out (that might be just a problem with my interpretation of the words "slur" and "casual" ).
> 
> She isn't actually leaving out the endings - that would sound differently, and be wrong - but endings have a habit of somehow affecting (extending) the penultimate syllable, instead of being pronounced on their own in the end. Like the first word "alle", the "l" sounds quite long, which it wouldn't if there hadn't been an e on the end. You get the same in "mennesker", where the second e doesn't really sound by itself, but makes the preceding n longer. And what you write as "uh" is a common way of pronouncing final "-er".
> 
> Not sure if this has made you run away screaming. Obviously, I'm no expert on the rules for pronunciation, I only know how it works in practice, but have been saved the trouble of learning them explicitly . As Alex suggests, there are dialects that don't use the glottal stop, but as he says it seems a bit strange to focus on one dialect (besides you'd be unable to find _any_ learning material on that) and I don't think that's your main problem right now anyway .
> 
> @alex, be aware that posting video links is not allowed according to forum rules. Besides, the one you posted isn't funny, it's just wrong.



Lmao ahh I thought it was pretty funnybtw I wasn't showing him that as a genuine way of learning Danish. It was just a lighthearted look at how some Norwegians view the language as something that has descendend 'into meaningless gluttaral sounds.' Which is exactly what BlackWolf was saying.

@BlackWolf - I find Spanish much harder to follow than Danish. While it may be hard to see now, Danish has far much more in common with English. Spanish people to me, just speak unbeleivebly fast.


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## xBlackWolfx

alexpayne_uk said:


> Lmao ahh I thought it was pretty funnybtw I wasn't showing him that as a genuine way of learning Danish. It was just a lighthearted look at how some Norwegians view Danish.


 
The first time I found that video years ago, it was supposedly making fun of the fact that Danish is supposedly divided into an abnormal number of different dialects which is supposedly causing a problem for Denmark since no one can understand what eachother is saying on the internet. No idea if that's true or not, I personnally don't see how a language could become so divided in such a small area. <Moderator deleted text - off-topic comment>



alexpayne_uk said:


> @BlackWolf - I find Spanish much harder to follow than Danish. While it may be hard to see now, Danish has far much more in common with English. Spanish people to me, just speak unbeleivebly fast.


.

Some languages do talk faster than others. <Moderator deleted text - off-topic comment>


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## hanne

It's true that some people pronounce words more clearly when they're reading something aloud, and pronouncing syllables that they otherwise wouldn't ("kunne" is "could" by the way, either past tense or infinitive). I usually take this as an indicator that they're not the strongest readers, and don't "process" the text while reading it ("process" doesn't mean understand, just that they somehow don't link the words to the way they'd normally pronounce them). I think it mostly sounds awkward, but it's not all that uncommon (it's very hard to put a figure to it, could be something like 5-20% who do this, or some other number...).

Regarding dialects as an explanation of the video, I think you must have misunderstood that. Dialects usually aren't an issue in Denmark - they're disappearing faster here than in e.g. Norway or Sweden. In fact dialects are in a very strong position in Norway, so I find it hard to believe that they would make a joke out of Danish dialects.

If "slur" is something that's applied at random, it's certainly not what we do in Danish. There are certain syllables that can be left out or combined or whatever, but not just any syllable you like, and there's pretty much only one way of doing it. If you slur the wrong syllables, your speech will quickly become incomprehensible.


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## Silver_Biscuit

I don't know anything about Danish, but it strikes me as pretty unsurprising that you should listen to an unfamiliar language and not be able to clearly differentiate the words. If you are just starting to learn, then you need to give your ears and brain time to get accustomed to the rhythm and which bits are left out and so forth.

<Moderator deleted text - off-topic comments>


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## kepulauan

Well, the declaration of human rights is not that problematic. At least you know what she is saying. Wait until you listen to tv shows or people speaking live! Now that I've brought you the worst news, things can only get better. Good luck with the adventure.


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## Tjahzi

Haha, very amusing topic I must say. As much as I understand you BlackWolf, especially from a Swedish speaker's point of view, it seems frustration is about to get the better of you. 

You have encountered one of the most reducing languages in the world, which also happens to contain the somewhat unique phonetic feature commonly referred to as *stød*. This is not a case of arbitrary "slurring", but rather a phonologic phenomenon in which certain syllables are modified according to a set of rules. However, from my own experience, these features in combination makes it very hard to distinguish completely dropped syllables from merely reduced syllables from syllables with _stød_. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest that you read everything you can find on _stød_, starting with the wikipedia article, and try to learn the patterns of reduction. 
Personally, I am not very fond of the generally preferred, and used, method of _trial and error_, although it obviously has to be applied to some extent, but rather prefer to learn as much theory as possible in order to acquire the ability to understand what is being done and why. I find this to be more effective than just trying to grasp syllables randomly and try to make them fit in somewhere.

That said, I had a look at www.speakdanish.dk and I found most of those sentences to be much easier to understand than all other forms of spoken Danish that I encounter. Just to confirm this I went and listened to some podcasts at www.dr.dk and found myself lost every third sentence (which is normal if I do not focus too much). 

With reservation for being pessimistic, dismissing and/or biased; have you considered trying Swedish or Norwegian instead? The _written language-not-corresponding-to-spoken-problem_ would be more or less gone.


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## xBlackWolfx

I want to learn Danish to learn more about the country, I'm actually hoping to move away from the United States someday and Denmark right now is one of my options. 

<Moderator deleted text - off-topic comment>


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## hanne

xBlackWolfx said:


> I want to learn Danish to learn more about the country, I'm actually hoping to move away from the United States someday and Denmark right now is one of my options.


If it's any consolation, it's not a problem to get by in Denmark with just English - pretty much everyone here can speak it reasonably well. Of course, if you're going to stay for more than a few years it'll be an advantage to learn Danish (letters, signs, whatever _is_ printed in Danish), but probably the task of learning it will be easier when you're surrounded by it (even though many learners complain that they can't get to practise their Danish, because everyone keeps talking English to them ).

And regarding your two other questions, I'm pretty sure a mod will show up eventually to split this thread, because they're way off-topic .


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## Wilma_Sweden

hanne said:


> If it's any consolation, it's not a problem to get by in Denmark with just English - pretty much everyone here can speak it reasonably well. Of course, if you're going to stay for more than a few years it'll be an advantage to learn Danish (letters, signs, whatever _is_ printed in Danish), but probably the task of learning it will be easier when you're surrounded by it (even though many learners complain that they can't get to practise their Danish, because everyone keeps talking English to them ).


Yup, immersion is probably the most effective method of learning spoken Danish. I've learnt to understand a lot through watching Danish TV with Danish subtitles, which is available in southern Sweden. Maybe you might find it easier to deal with written language first, i.e. focus on grammar and vocabulary for a while, and then get back to spoken language later?



hanne said:


> And regarding your two other questions, I'm pretty sure a mod will show up eventually to split this thread, because they're way off-topic .


*<Mod hat on>* I have done some major cleaning in this thread to keep the focus on the topic, which was spoken Danish. I'm not splitting the thread as there were too many digressions. Names can be discussed in a separate thread - feel free to open one yourselves. History is outside the scope of this forum, unless it's a cultural issue that can be dealt with in the Culture Café forum open to Senior members.

If any of you would like a copy of your deleted texts, please send me a PM within the next few days. 

/Wilma


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## Sepia

xBlackWolfx said:


> ... She doesn't even appear to be pronouncing the last syllable of some of the words. Even French sounds clearer than this, and I've never been able to learn that either! Not that I'm insulting the language, English spelling is atrocious beyond all reason, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't figure out how to pronounce anything and I can't even learn to understand anything I hear!
> 
> Can anyone offer me help?


 
Although it depends a lot on the particular dialect I tend to say "bingo" here.

The best suggestion I can give is to get some DVD-movies in Danish where you can switch on English or Danish subtitles. Or listen to Danish music where you can read the lyrics from the cover. This is pretty much the way Danes learn English. Should work the other way around too.


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## Havfruen

I've seen a few Danish Youtube music videos with Danish text posted or Danish subtitles. If you're actually in Denmark, you can get TV subtitles in Danish for both Danish-language and the many English-language programs shown. Viewing DVDs is a good idea. I've even found Danish movies occasionally amongst the offerings of my American cable TV subscription's "free on demand movies," which of course have English subtitles and can be replayed as many times as you like. While I can watch some Danish TV programs via the internet from USA, I haven't seen any programs with subtitles online. If anyone knows of any options for this, I'd appreciate suggestions.


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## Havfruen

I've seen a few Danish Youtube music videos with Danish text posted or Danish subtitles. If you're actually in Denmark, you can get TV subtitles in Danish for both Danish-language and the many English-language programs shown. Viewing DVDs is a good idea. I've even found Danish movies occasionally amongst the offerings of my American cable TV subscription's "free on demand movies," which of course have English subtitles and can be replayed as many times as you like. While I can watch some Danish TV programs via the internet from USA, I haven't seen any programs with subtitles online. If anyone knows of any options for this, I'd appreciate suggestions.


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## Sepia

... I suddenly notice that you are from Seattle - shouldn't be too difficult to find Danish-speaking people there although probably not as easily as in Vancouver, B.C.


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## Havfruen

Indeed, it was pretty amazing when I moved to Seattle and there are all these Scandinavians-- more than other US cities where I've lived before. I have definitely run across some Danes here, although probably there's probably more Swedes and Norwegians. But I'm not the one who started this thread.

It used to be that you couldn't watch Danish TV online unless you used computer with a Danish IP address and now that's changed. Mange tak to  all the Danish taxpayers who are funding Danish TV viewing for us foreigners.


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