Danish Lessons

OK, so a while back I promised to fill you in on how my Danish lesson went so I'm writing now specifically for that purpose.

I've only had one so far. I wasn't looking forward to it, to be honest. I figured since it would be one on one with the instructor, it would be incredibly embarrassing and I would make a fool of myself. But it went surprisingly well, and fast! It was 2 hours long and I anticipated it to drag on forever. It was a shock to look up at the clock and realize it was already time for Anne (my instructor) to leave.

Anne is very sweet and made me feel comfortable right away. My inhibitions about sounding like a dork went away after maybe 30 seconds. Anne also teaches Chinese at the University (OMG) and she said it's very common for her students to feel that way at first but it goes away. Hey, she was right! Anyway, she said I was a natural (yes!!) and she could hardly tell I was American when I was repeating the words and phrases given to me. It isn't easy though. Let me give you a couple of examples:

First of all, the town we live in is Græsted. And when Andreas and I talk about it we always Americanize it and say it like Gray-stead. But to pronounce it correctly, you have to have your tongue right up against your bottom teeth and say the r in the back of your throat like this Glay-sta. (and no, you don't sound out the d at the end)

Another thing that will be confusing is that some of the letters get kind of skipped over during pronunciation or sound like different letters altogether. If I want to say "My name is Charlotte" I say "Jeg hedder Charlotte" but hedder is said like 'helle', the d's sound like l's. And, the number 50 is halvtreds but you don't pronounce the v or the d, so it's more or less 'haltres'.

Numbers are probably the oddest of all. The numbers above 50 are 20-based not 10-based. I'm not even going to try and explain it because I don't understand it myself. And when you say 21,22,23....you say it as 1 and 20, 2 and 20, 3 and 20...and so on.

That's all I have for now. Hav en god dag! (have a nice day)