Why I took on Danish

I’ve been treating language learning as a gym for the mind since 2013, when I took German. Every so often I get the itch for another session. Last month I started Danish.

Part of it is continuation. I spent six months on Norwegian in 2022, for no particular reason, and the two are close enough that Danish looked like the obvious next thing to pick up.

Part of it is that Danish is hard. It’s reckoned to have roughly the second hardest pronunciation in Europe, and that was the appeal rather than the problem. A gym session you can do without effort isn’t really a gym session.

The roots go back further than either of those, though. I worked at EveryMatrix, which is Danish-owned, and I spent years around Danes. I liked what I saw there. The flat structure. The directness, which takes some getting used to if you didn’t grow up with it and is a relief once you have. The fact that work-life balance was a thing people actually did rather than a poster on a wall. I liked it enough that I’ve spent the years since putting the same things in place at eJobs, which has worked better than I expected.

So the language was probably always going to happen at some point.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy

The reactions have been remarkably consistent. Why take on a small language. A useless one. One whose pronunciation sits so far from its spelling that it makes French look logical.

I don’t really have a counter-argument. It is small. For almost every practical purpose it is useless. And the spelling is less a rule than a suggestion that the speaker is free to ignore.

That’s sort of the point though. I’m not learning it to use it.

Does the Norwegian help?

A lot, so far. Enough that I’ve skipped things I would otherwise have had to learn from nothing, and enough that the first few weeks felt unfairly easy.

There is one side effect I didn’t see coming. I currently speak Danish with a Norwegian accent, which I’m told is very funny if you are Danish.

LATER EDIT: The accent stuck around for a few months and then faded. What I didn’t expect was the traffic going the other way: once Danish got past a certain point it started pulling my Norwegian up with it. They’re separate in my head now and I can hold a conversation in either without much conscious effort. Måske or kanskje comes out on its own, and I no longer have to think about which one I’m in.