LANGUAGE SCHOOLS 2022 WINTER GUIDE
PXFUEL
IMPACT PIXABAY
By Edward Owen
LINGUA DANCA: THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING DANISH
If you’re new to Copenhagen, there’s a good chance you will have never heard anything quite like the Danish language. Sure, maybe you’ve watched a few episodes of ‘The Bridge’, but essentially your brain switches onto autopilot as you read the subtitles. You’ve also noticed that the Danes seem to speak pretty good English. And so, you could easily convince yourself that learning the language isn’t really a priority. The fact of the matter is there are of course a myriad of advantages to learning the native language of your new home – especially given the strong possibility that you won’t want to leave. Employment: Avoid the creek! Some ability in Danish will present you with a wider range of choice in your chosen profession. Perhaps you’re here in Copenhagen because you work for a large international company and the official language is English. However, there is no doubt that new opportunities within such firms – in different departments
2
or new projects – will be available to you if you can grasp Danish.
open up significantly more opportunities than those already within your reach.
But what if you came here as a refugee of love or to follow your spouse, and your qualifications (a bachelor’s degree for example) aren’t what the big companies are thinking of when they talk about ‘highly-skilled foreigners’. The truth is that even if you find a job that specifies mother tongue English, they will very often still want you to speak Danish when socialising with the other workers. Such a situation can spoil the office hygge!
Education: Join the clique! Attending university is one of the main reasons for the large international presence in Copenhagen, and learning Danish will also help at school.
Within the service industry there are some employers who don’t have a preference on your Danish language skills and there are some that do. The point remains: you will have more options if you can get to grips with Danish. Whatever your profession, you will eventually find yourself in a situation in which knowledge of Danish is highly advantageous at work. The time may also come where you want to change your job or employer, and it’s at this point that the ability to use the language will
LANGUAGE SCHOOLS GUIDE WI NT ER 2 022
Remember: many programs are available in English, but the number is being cut. Now, we’re not suggesting you move to Denmark and immediately enrol onto a course taught in Danish, but there is a significant amount of group work involved in a Danish education. Inevitably, you will find yourself in one such group as the only foreigner. Imagine; you take a five-minute break from your group work and grab a coffee. Upon your return your peers are chattering away in Danish – no big deal, right? Wrong. It turns out that as you were gazing off into the distance, important decisions were made about the direction of the group project. If only you had understood, you could have recognised the importance of the conversation.
IMPACT Socially: Power when you speak! It’s also important to consider your social life outside of work. Making friends with Danes can be a tough audition. Being able to converse in Danish will really allow you to immerse yourself in society and glide through social interactions and feel more at home. The day-to-day situations in which a good command of Danish can be an advantage are numerous, but here are a few examples.
Afghanistan and Syria, they wouldn’t have learned English as a child, but most will speak Danish after being here for a few months.
‘Getting around’ Place names, directions, announcements on transport – particularly out in the regions where far fewer Danes tend to speak English well. Imagine you’re sat on the train and it fails to depart – there’s an announcement and everyone gets off the train. You can assume this train is going nowhere – but what did the announcement say?!
‘Complaining’ Whether it’s in a checkout queue or at the traffic lights, if you’re speaking in English, will they admit to understanding you?
‘Life administration’ Paying bills, making purchases online, understanding receipts and terms and conditions, checking the small print etc. You are responsible for your own tax assessment in Denmark – receiving a large tax bill at the end of the year is not ideal. ‘Basic communication’ Not just with the Danes, but with a sizeable chunk of the 10 percent of the population who aren’t Danish, but don’t speak English. Immigrating from countries like Eritrea,
‘Making new friends’ Not just with the Danes but also the social outlet offered by language school. Many often remain friends for decades, and it’s not unknown for some to start sports clubs once the learning experience is over.
‘Eavesdropping’ Fun in any language. ‘Safety’ Last, but by no means least. In an emergency situation, Danish language skills could prove to be the difference – offering crucial clarity and timesaving. Culturally: New horizons to seek Ultimately it might come down to how well you want to get to know and appreciate your new home. Imagine the excitement many feel at being able to read and appreciate Hans Christian Andersen’s stories in their original language, or the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.
Danish also connects you with the past and the culture and history of northern Europe. It developed from Old Norse, which eventually split into Old West Norse, spoken in Norway and Iceland, and Old East Norse, spoken in Sweden and Denmark. Eventually, Old East Norse evolved into the Danish that is spoken today. Believe it or not, there are many regional dialects in Denmark and its territories, of which many are still spoken today. If you understand Danish you can go to more events, exhibitions and social happenings. Learning Danish will make you aware they are happening in the first place and will also allow you to get more out of them once you are there. And don’t forget that Danish is closely related to Norwegian and Swedish, even if their Scandinavian neighbours to tend to mock the Danes for sounding as if we speak with a potato in our mouths. So you’re not just learning one language, but three! Norwegian (bokmål) is almost a carbon copy of Danish, with a few distinctions irrelevant to normal every-day use. Swedish uses some unique words and phrases, but to a great extent is very understandable to Danish speakers.
THE CONUNDRUM
SO MANY LANGUAGE SCHOOLS – but which one to choose?
PIXABAY
There are many different types of language schools offering a range of courses catering to your individual needs and circumstances. Let us help you find the school that is right for you.
What’s available As well as teaching Danish to adult foreigners, many schools offer a wide range of other courses, including special youth courses and courses on Danish culture and society.
Getting started Once you have arrived here and have settled, getting started on language tuition is relatively simple and requires only that you have a Danish CPR number (civil registration number).
There are long courses that run during the academic year, short intensive courses and summer courses. Depending on your needs, time, interests and prior qualifications, the main options below are available to you:
You will have to apply for this through the website or office of your local kommune (municipality).
Via the municipality Local authorities are required by law to offer Danish language and culture courses to all foreign residents. The local language schools offer courses at all levels. The target groups for these courses are new immigrants and refugees.
In order to obtain a CPR number, you have to meet the following criteria: • You have been in Denmark for more than three months; • If you are an EU citizen, you have a registration certificate (not Nordic citizens though); • If you are a non-EU citizen, you have obtained a residence permit; • You have a valid, permanent address. A minimum length of one month’s stay is expected, but you might be asked to provide proof of three months. All this will be checked and your registration will not be accepted if there are any anomalies. Your registration can be cancelled if the address proves to be illegal. You will also be expected to provide other documentation, such as a valid passport, a marriage certificate if you are married and the birth certificates of your children if you have them with you.
4
It is also possible to study in neighbouring municipalities, such as Frederiksberg, so it is wise to go online and check individual language schools. It is usually possible to enrol on courses several times a year. Mandatory examinations are held twice a year. Adult learning centres The adult learning centres (VUCs) offer courses in all general subjects for adults at lower and upper secondary school level. In addition to the general courses offered to Danes, some of the VUCs offer Danish language courses for foreigners. Each course lasts 6-12 months and comprises 240 lessons. You can obtain more information on these courses from your lo-
LANGUAGE SCHOOLS GUIDE WI NT ER 2 022
cal municipality or from the individual adult learning centre. If you are interested in a more intensive or perhaps a more individually designed course, you can enquire at one of the local language centres about private language teachers. Folk high schools Some folk high schools (folkehøjskoler) offer residential courses in Danish language and culture, either during the summer holiday (3-4 weeks) or during the autumn and spring semesters (4-5 months). These courses do not normally include formal tests or examinations. The Secretariat for the Danish Folk High Schools will provide you with further information about courses, admission and tuition fees. Visit hojskolerne.dk for more information. Higher education institutions In connection with a language school, some institutions offer intensive Danish language courses at the beginning of the academic year, during the semester, or as a part of a summer university program. Students who are enrolled at the institution are not usually charged a tuition fee, but have to pay a deposit of 1,250 kroner. Private instruction There are many private language schools and instructors out there. This type of learning is ideal for those who don’t have time to attend scheduled classes.
TALKING POINT
THE INTERLOPER IN OUR MIDST The influence of English on Danish has been monumental in the 21st century It’s rather difficult to eavesdrop on a conversation between younger Danes these days without hearing an English word or two being bandied about. And that’s not a coincidence, according to an expert who has found that upwards of 10 percent of the Danish language is influenced by English. In fact, the impact of English on the Danish language has been significant since the turn of the century. Testing tolerance Henrik Gottlieb, an associate professor at the Department of English, German and Romance studies at the University of Copenhagen (KU), contends that of the 50,000-100,000 words that make up the Danish language there are 12,000 Anglicisms – a word or construction borrowed from English. “We can’t really do without many of the words that come to us from English, like the word ‘film’, for instance. But the frequency of Anglicisms has reached a point today that the linguistic tolerance levels of many Danes is being challenged,” Gottlieb told Kristeligt Dagblad. Gottlieb maintains that Danish
has long ‘borrowed’ from the dominating language of the time, but through the 20th century the influence of English grew steadily and in the 21st century it has become monumental. Too smart by half Gottlieb is behind the Danish contribution to the global Anglicism database network (GLAD) that 100 researchers are currently building up. The project is due to run until 2021 and Gottlieb has already documented about half of the Anglicisms in Danish – about 6,000. “It is my estimation that 5-10 percent of words in Danish today stem from English, and only some give rise to irritation. One of the most used is ‘app’, which has seen a meteoric rise in the language since 2008, but hasn’t produced much trouble,” said Gottlieb, who is working on a new book on the subject, ‘Echoes of English’. “But it’s more annoying when the IT or business sectors use smart-arse English expressions, or when you say ‘rolig nu’, which is taken from the English ‘easy now’, instead of using ‘tag det roligt’.” Gottlieb did suggest that while there are many English words entering and bringing new meaning to Danish, most of the
words are used in accordance with the grammatical principles of Danish.
For further reading on the issue, check out ‘A Dictionary of Anglicisms in Danish’ by Knud Sørensen from 1997.
OPINION
IRRITABLE VOWEL SYNDROME
By Jennifer Buley
speech, Danish actually has some 40 vowel sounds, explained Bleses, depending upon where the vowels are placed in words and sentence strings.
A 15-month-old Croatian child understands approximately 150 words, while a Danish child of the same age understands just 84 on average.
To make matters worse, modern Danes ‘swallow’ lots of the remaining consonants that would create more audible definition, or annunciation, between words. Linguists call it ‘reduction’ or ‘ellision’. It is how ‘probably’ becomes ‘probly’ in American English. In Danish, it is how ‘spændende’ becomes ‘spennă’, and how a simple, little sentence like ‘Det er det‘ becomes ‘dā-ă-dā’ …
An overabundance of vowel sounds makes Danish a difficult language to learn – even for Danish children, say linguists
It’s not because Danish kids are dumb, or because Croatian kids are geniuses. It’s because Danish has too many vowel sounds, according to Dorthe Bleses, a linguist at the Center for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark. “The number of vowels has big significance for how difficult it is to learn a language. Many vowels makes a difficult language,” Bleses told Weekendavisen newspaper in 2011.
Hardest to learn While marvelling at Danish pronunciation is an amusing pastime for tourists, immigrants and other Scandinavians, the irony is that the pronunciation is terribly hard even for Danish children to learn.
“’Y’ isn’t a vowel,” you say? Well, in Danish it is. In Danish, even consonants are vowels.
Bleses researched how children in seven different cultures acquire their native languages. Of the seven – Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, American English, Croatian and Galician – she found that Danish was the most difficult for children to learn.
But written Danish is not the issue. The problems start when Danes speak. In spoken
She discovered that the number of vowel sounds in a language determine not only
Forty vowel sounds to master The official number of vowels in Danish is nine: a, e, i, o, u, æ, ø, å and y.
6
LANGUAGE SCHOOLS GUIDE WI NT ER 2 022
how many words a 15-month-old baby understands, but also the number of words a child is able to speak and use. Accordingly, the linguist contended, young Danish children have smaller vocabularies than children learning the other six languages. A decade of development Does the difficulty of the language have anything to do with how early children begin learning in school? Bleses thinks so. “Of course it’s important that the teacher knows these things in the earliest school grades and can explain the difficult connection between the sounds and the letters. For that reason the learning ability can take a little longer to develop,” she told Weekendavisen. “But the difference between the Croatian child and the Danish child doesn’t persist. Once the children have reached the third or fourth grade, the linguistic code has been cracked, and then other things have significance for whether the student learns well,” she added. In other words, according to the linguist, it takes Danish children with Danish parents until they are nine or ten years old – in the third or fourth grade – to “crack the code” of the Danish language.
OPINION
HAPPILY WELL, THEY CAN’T STOP SAYING “HVAD”?
By Stephanie Brickman I’m standing at the bar by a very large jar of peanuts. The barmaid in front of me is about 102 years old. I go for a polite form. “Må jeg bed om nogen jordnødder?” I ask amicably. “Hvad?” comes the reply. I repeat myself several times pointing more and more theatrically at the peanuts. Slowly driving one nuts “Nå … jordnødder!” she says eventually, beaming at me, and I utter what has begun to be my catchphrase: “That’s what I said …” I glance around briefly in an attempt to gain confirmation from a witness that I had indeed said I wanted peanuts. Alas no witnesses are forthcoming. It’s her word against mine and since no-one understands mine … But then, aside from the challenges of understanding me, I sometimes wonder if Danes understand each other. The most common reply to anything in this country seems to be: “Hvad siger du?” Irritable vowel syndrome I shouldn’t blame others. The dire state of my Danish has shown little improvement since about six months after I arrived – roughly when I dropped out of language school to take up a job that required no Danish.
Since then, like most foreigners, I have lurched from being misunderstood to misunderstanding and lapsing into English out of sheer apathy. Understanding takes concentration and it’s so tempting to just relax and allow the language soup of strange vowels and barely articulated consonants to wash by. Part of the problem is that there’s virtually no opportunity to practise. We live in a fairly well-heeled area where Nordic-blond parents (wearing shades of dove grey and beige – hey it’s spring, let’s get frisky) usher children (dressed in beige and grey) between their tastefully decorated houses (mostly white) and the high-achieving local school. People speak English. A game of Poobaloo The one beacon of linguistic opportunity is the corner shop and the guys who work in it. I’m on first-name terms with one of them, Aykut. He has mostly called me Jennifer, which is a first name, even if it’s not mine, so we still qualify for ‘first-name terms’. Aykut is the only person in the whole of Denmark who ever attempts to conduct a conversation with me in Danish. He seems to understand me, although I don’t always completely understand what he is saying.
When I first started coming to his shop, he’d always say this weird thing at the till. It sounded like: “Poobaloo?” I would say “Poobaloo?” back and he would take that as a reply. It worked, but I didn’t know what it meant. Eventually I figured out it was “pâ beløbet”. He was asking me if I wanted cash back or not. Lost in the Milky Ways A few days ago I popped in to buy some milk and have a chat. There was a new person at the till standing next to Aykut and a delivery guy was there too. Affably, Aykut introduces me to the new cashier. I greet her smiling and launch into a longish (considering it’s in Danish) introduction. I tell her the ‘poobaloo’ story. Aykut and I are chuckling away, but I realise she is looking very blank and the delivery guy is pretending to look at the Milky Ways. I sense I’ve lost them. Aykut leans over the counter and says in Danish: “They don’t understand you.” We shrug shoulders and grin. I skulk off into the night. The original version was first published in March 2016.
LANGUAGE SCHOOLS GUIDE W INTE R 2 02 2
7
OPINION
THE JOYS OF THE DANISH LANGUAGE
By Ray Weaver This being an English publication, we assiduously avoid speaking Danish at every opportunity. Most of us can mumble a few phrases, at various levels of competence, but it really does make your head hurt after a while. Choking on pork rind Let’s face it. Danish is virtually unpronounceable to anyone not born here. I think there is a chemical reaction that happens when leverpostej is smeared on rugbrød that renders a Danish child’s tongue able to say these words. Extra letters. Why? Really. Why? So you have a written version of something that sounds like you are choking on a pork rind? And of course, no matter how many times our Danish friends and significant others rail at us that we should “snak dansk for helvede!”, as soon as we do, they switch to English. Their delicate ears are simply not accustomed to hearing their musical, mellifluous language spoken with an ugly coarse, foreign accent. Heaven forfend! Can I borrow your kok? But, there is fun to be had whilst we wade through Danskland.
8
As a musician, I learned early on not to ask a Danish guitarist if I could borrow his pi(c)k. My elderly mother required smelling salts and a whisky after my Danish wife told her she was very pleased that I was such a great kok in the kitchen. And my microwave calls me a slut every time my Thai box has finished heating properly. And I’m betting that many of those reading this column have snapped a photo of at least one ‘Turistfart’ sign. I know I have. (If you are not sure why any of the above are funny, it’s your Danish assignment this week to find out why.) Meat stuck in my tooth meat One of the first things any expat learns to love is the literalness of Danish translations. How can you not love a language in which the word for gums literally translates as ‘tooth meat’, a vacuum cleaner is a ‘dust sucker’ and a refrigerator is a ‘cold closet’. It’s brilliant! Although Danes are loathe to hear expats butcher their syntax, they are quite proud of their ability to speak English, and regale us with it at every opportunity. Unfortunately, much of their knowledge comes from teachers. I
LANGUAGE SCHOOLS GUIDE WI NT ER 2 022
was bemused – and a little pissed off – the first time I had a parent/teacher conference with my son’s English teacher and he told me, right up front: “I don’t speak English.” I learnt it on DR Ultra Many Danes get much of their English from films and, of course, there is no filter as to who is watching what when. One of my first encounters with Danes speaking my language was in the company of a father and his two blonde-haired, blue-eyed young children on a windswept Bornholm beach. Twenty years ago, Yanks on Bornholm were a bit of a novelty, so the dad was excited to introduce me to the kids. “This is Ray. He comes from America. He speaks English.” While I was puzzling why Daddy had not introduced me – a grown man – as Mr Weaver, I could see the blue-eyed boy struggling shyly for a suitable English phrase. “Fuck you!” he squeaked happily. “You fucking motherfucker!” his sister joyfully exclaimed. Their dad beamed. The original version was first published in October 2014.