Learning Language

We are approaching the two month mark in Denmark, September 25^th will make it officially 2 months and by now our relationship with language has taken some new twists and turns. We no longer giggle at fart and slut, those are old news now, what does make us giggle is the translations provided by Google Translate. We are trying to get into the habit of reading children’s books in Danish and translating helps us pronounce and understand…. sometimes.

Kasketten har jo skygge  - the cap has the shadow

We also listen closely to conversations around us and to television to see if we can pick out any Danish we recognize. The other morning I recognized that a colleague said “It was the electrician”, there was a fire alarm related to some electrical work. Context helps make sense of things, as do words that sound like English. Leanne was pleased to hear and understand a mother tell her little girl that she was carrying the big package, again context; she was carrying the big package.

The problem is that few sentences are so simple and people don’t speak to adults the way they speak to small children, perhaps if everyone spoke as though they were talking to a toddler…. Another problem is the way the Danish language sounds (the Danes say this themselves), I have heard from a few sources about a saying that refers to how Danish speakers sound like they are talking with a potato in their mouth. It sounded strange at first until I imagined what that would sound like. It is very difficult to know when one word stops and another begins, of course if you pay close attention to yourself speaking English you can imagine that difficulty for people learning English too.

As we learn some words we play with trying to make sentences with our (very) limited vocabulary and I find myself pausing to search for words, and that’s where I find...  French? I guess that’s how our brains work, when we search for a word in a language over which we don’t have full command we find words from other languages we don’t really know.