When I first moved to Denmark ten years ago, I hit the language learning hard and fast. Within a couple weeks of getting a CPR number, I was spending around fifteen hours a week in Danish class and about the same amount of time studying at home. I kinda fell in love with the language, seeing it as my entrée into building a life in Denmark.
Our old school teacher encouraged repetition (okay, nearly forced it), claiming that repeated mouth contortions and careful tongue positioning were needed to approximate the noises native Danish speakers produce. Walking the dog meant grunting along to vowel sounds piped through my headphones. A recording of the 30 distinct Danish vowels, along with the Danish alphabet song and a sing-song of numbers up to a hundred, topped my most-played tracks. I listened to Danish podcasts at 0.8 speed, pausing to repeat a particularly challenging pronunciation or look up yet another new word. Den Danske Ordbog was essentially on speed dial.
Nearly full-time language immersion, took me from barely understanding a word and staring blankly at newspaper headlines to basic reading comprehension and confidently saying (and spelling) selvfølglig, my favorite Danish word. People stopped switching to English when I ordered at cafes. I unhesitatingly recited my CPR and phone numbers på dansk (and learned the perils of trying to buck the Danish convention of using two-digit chunks). I wasn’t completely fluent, but I prided myself on finding workarounds instead of reaching for English.
All those practice lessons yielded a higher than anticipated PD3 score and made doctors’ visits and admin tasks more than doable in Danish. Thanks to connections made through yoga, I was cultivating Danish-speaking friendships.
By the time we moved from Copenhagen to Zurich in 2019, I was functionally fluent. Part of my paid work involved translating marketing material for Danish homewares brands to English, preserving the original whimsy and flow, while toning down the Danish tendency to call everything “cozy” (I’m not convinced there’s a suitable way to actually express hygge in other languages). A volunteer commitment with a yoga cooperative frequently meant meetings in Danish as I was the only non-Danish speaker on the board (despite the studio mostly offering English-language classes). I even served as note taker once or twice!
Somehow my accent was favorably compared to Tasmanian-born Queen Mary (what a compliment!), although that slipped considerably after six years away.
My Danish language skills went by the wayside during four years attempting to muddle by with basic German in Zurich. (As a side note, don’t let anyone tell you that Swiss German is merely a dialect. My partner and I arrived in Switzerland with A2-level German and never successfully held a conversation without the other party switching to standard German or Hochdeutsch.) And operating effectively only in English while living in the UK wasn’t beneficial either.
One of my proudest Danish-speaking moments, however, came in the English town we called home for two years. Approximately the same size as Vejle (around 50,000 inhabitants), the town doesn’t have the diversity and urbanity of a capital city — and certainly not the same tourist draw. Imagine my surprise hearing native Danish at a local pub one afternoon. After twenty minutes of eavesdropping (and a drop of liquid courage), I asked the group, “Hvorfor kommer du her?” (why are you here?) and we had a lovely conversation in Danish (somewhat stilted on my part) about how they’d wound up in a mid-size Sussex market town.
Despite my absence from the language for six years, I never stopped loving Danish. For years, my partner and I have used Danish as our secret language (outside of Denmark, of course), with our partial command more than adequate to covertly express ourselves.
Returning to Denmark in early 2025, I found my Danish peppered with German. Being immersed helps, though, even if my motivation wavers. I can still book an appointment by phone or bumble through a meeting with the kommune. But without the foundation of Danish lessons and concerted at-home practice, I now wantonly throw English words into the mix.
In the decade since I first started learning Danish, language learning resources have evolved, with AI changing the landscape. (Take a look at Last Week in Denmark’s articles about learning Danish for proof!) I know that when I’m ready to re-embrace the tricky pronunciation (including the atrocity of the soft “D”) and stop depending on English, my confidence and capability will return. Although I might just have to start grunting vowels again.
