Help Learning When You Don't Have Good Resources - Danish

I’m learning Danish while living in the US, and it’s really hard. I’ve learned a fair amount of vocab from Duolingo and, most recently, Memrise, but there aren’t enough resources for me to learn this language without paying for an expensive source or going to Denmark. Does anyone else have this problem?

I started Danish recently and just finished the approximately 100 Dansk i øerne podcasts on LingQ. I think these are a great introduction to the language - short (about 5-10 minute episodes) about a Danish cultural item, spoken slowly and clearly.
In full disclosure, I already know Swedish so these were fairly simple for me, though even if I hadn’t known Swedish, I likely would have started here as well. If you find this too much a jump from your current level, you could try doing the first 15-20 ministories first and then trying this podcast again.

4 Likes

same thing i have with portuguese a language spoken with over 250 million speakers is frustratingly split between two dialects and still not enough good resources between the two at the beginner to upper beginner level compared to it’s sister latin languages

Are you looking outside of LingQ? Look on youtube, do some google searches for content. I found this reddit post that may be helpful.:

What’s Your Favourite YouTube Content for Helping Learn Danish? : r/Danish

Or look around in that reddit. Import the content that you can into LingQ.

There’s also a great series called Borgen that you can find on Netflix (if you have that). It will be hard for beginner, but may be fun to check out and watch in your native subtitles at first. Find out of there are some public channels you can get online from there and use a vpn to access. (ymmv—I’ve not tried Denmark, but have done this for Germany and also Australia)

Look for online Danish news…especially in “easy language” or for kids. I’ve found that for German, Norwegian and Spanish so it’s worth looking for it for Danish.

2 Likes

I’d pay for Lingq lifetime (cheap if you use it for years) and ebooks.

Here’s my recommendation: www.dr.dk

Maybe you’re too young to know this, but there’s something called “books.” They’re very interesting objects where you don’t read the text from a screen. Instead, the text is printed on a special material called paper. There’s still plenty of good learning material available in this format.

2 Likes

For the safety of all involved, please make sure you only do a body slam in the padded area going forward.

I’m having the same problem with Tagalog. I have been asking ChatGPT to write me stories. Which has really given me a lot more material! :slight_smile:

1 Like

Another excellent podcast is ‘Koen på isen’. You can find some episodes here on LingQ. For copyright reasons, you will need to import the rest yourself. In total, there are around 100 episodes.

You can find a whole range of Danish podcasts here:

Some even come with a transcript in PDF format. That quickly adds up to 100 hours or more.

You can watch Danish television via VPN. That’s it for starters.

4 Likes

Short Stories in Danish for Beginners by Olly Richards. Kindle version is mere $6. Don’t buy Coca Cola for a day (Americans drink it like water) you can definitely buy it from Amazon.

1 Like

I recommend finding non-danish books translated into danish and reading them on lingq. To do that you have to find them in an e-book format (epub, mobi) and upload in the platform. Start with childrens books, little prince, etc.

The reason I recommend non-danish authors is because the translated language is often simpler than natives write in, at least in my experience. I’ve been reading lots of Haruki Murakami in danish and having a good time, but when I try to read Tove Ditlevsen every other word is new.

How to find these books I’ll leave up to you, but I hear that Anna has a decent archive :wink:

1 Like

Before you pay lifetime, note that it’s per language.

1 Like

I tried to read Olly Richards’ Short Stories in German for Beginners (the same collection of short stories has been translated into multiple languages), but I found the quality of writing to be quite terrible. I know this series is popular among language learners, but I’d imagine it’s mostly due to a lack of accessible beginner-level materials, not so much the content of the books themselves.

I would personally recommend reading books written for older children or pre-teens. They tend to be relatively straightforward in writing style and subject matter, compared to novels written for adults. I’m currently learning Icelandic and I’ve purchased a couple of 200-page children’s novels for roughly 6.50 eur each, which I find to be a reasonable price. Reading them has greatly improved my language skills (I’m now halfway through the second book).

4 Likes

Just read the Danish news and watch Danish TV for free. That’s how I learned Swedish. I did it entirely without using textbooks or dictionaries too, I just started by trying to pick out words that looked like English. Some of the first things I watched were nature documentaries and some of the first things I “read” were newspaper articles and history textbooks. Make sure you turn captions on so you are reading and listening to the Danish at the same time.

You can also play a bunch of videogames on Steam in Danish, among other things, even when they are fan translations. And you can get tons of ebooks.

Also join chatrooms, read online forums, and other stuff in Danish. See if you can listen to Danish national radio online (not podcasters - the normal radio). It will introduce you to a ton of different accents and dialects which is very, very important.

It took me about 1.5-2 years to get to C1 level in Swedish doing that. You could learn faster since you will have a dictionary and stuff.

You can even do stuff like watch lessons in Danish that teach Greenlandic. And there is plenty of music - search “Skibet Skal Sejle I Nat” and “Sku ha gået hjem”.

3 Likes