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The Danish Language | |
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I started my Danish language course last week (Sept 13). We had an initiation ceremony called "The language bath" last weekend - 7 hrs of undiluted Danish (4 hrs on Friday and 3 on Saturday). It's an immersion technique where the instructors speak to students only in Danish - quite effective, I should say. I was in a class of 40 20-year olds who had just landed in Aalborg and were still in a party mood - I could see the smoke in their eyes and smell the beer on their breaths. Feeling totally out of place in more ways than one, I wondered how long I could hold on. Surprisingly, it was a lot of fun. I found myself in a class full of international students - surrounded by strange accents struggling to sound Danish, I finally felt at home! :) My regular Danish classes are held Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6:30 p.m. My class has about 30 students. I also have a "conversation partner," a young Danish student who meets me a couple of hours twice a week. She says I have a good sense of language - only time will tell, I whispered to myself. I'm totally intrigued by this language. I've never seen any language whose written and spoken forms are so distanced from one another. Spoken Danish has hardly anything in common with written Danish. It makes me wonder about the evolutionary path of this language. The two seem like very distant cousins. And to add to the confusion, the Danes speak Danish extremely fast. They combine words, dropping syllables along their way. Danish sounds seem to jump from the bottom of the throat to the front of the mouth and vice versa, skipping the whole mouth region. This gives it an intonation pattern that made it sound almost like Chinese to me initially! Crazy, right??? With about a week of Danish, I can see my knowledge of German helping me now. Earlier I could see no resemblance between the two although Danish belongs to the Indo-Germanic family of languages. Anyway, this has brought Haema and me closer - we are now study buddies in Danish! :) |
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