Elena Sokolova, February 4th 2025
I want to share some thoughts on how to boost your level of Danish, especially nowadays, when we have advanced tools like ChatGPT. It’s a great tool that you can use to train your brain on numerous examples it can generate. In a way, close to how ChatGPT itself is trained on numerous examples. However, using ChatGPT in language production is addictive, like sugar. Although unlike actual sugar, is not always available at hand, or during an exam…
Writing and producing sentences on your own, without the help of ChatGPT requires some conscious control of your phrase. Especially in Danish, where the sentence structure is fixed, and may be hard to get used to for non-native speakers. So it’s normal that when you learn Danish you need an extra effort to word your sentence and which may prompt you to think ‘Why so? - It’s somehow artificial’.
For native speakers of Danish, wrong sentence structure sounds “broken” in terms of rhythm and melody. If the improper wording of the phrase “breaks” its rhythmical pattern, native speakers may misunderstand you. Аnd you will think this is because of your accent, wrong pronunciation of vowels… and many other things, but it is actually the rhythm and melody (the flow of stressed and unstressed words) that people perceive and process. So, a broken sentence structure leads to a broken rhythm.
As a non-native speaker of Danish myself, I asked natives what an inversion mistake sounds like. They told me that a certain wording is kind of an expectation in their language perception. If you say e.g. ‘måske’, then the native language perception is tuned to hear a verb. Of course, native speakers do not think in parts of speech (e.g. a noun, a verb…), but in terms of pragmatics of their utterance. The pragmatics determines the choice of the wording, and as a consequence - the rhythm. Thus, a word order is not just a pure grammatical thing, and it works in correlation with syntactical (sentence) stress and therefore with the rhythm and melody.
ChatGPT is trained on a large set with millions of phrases where a prompt triggers a particular match. If you want to train producing sentences this way, with millions of examples, maybe it could work, but how long will it take before you can produce the language on your own? And, considering you have a new context every time in a new conversation, how many examples will you have to memorise?
I believe it is actually more efficient to understand how to form the phrase based on the thought you want to express and the logic of your utterance. This is because in your head, during your first years of learning and using Danish, you will still be thinking in and translating from your native language (or from another foreign language you are fluent in). So a set of rules for the sentence structure with a number of tools such as conjunctions (‘selvom’, ‘mens’, ‘da’…), will be the connectors you can rely on when transferring your thought to Danish.
Having a language sample with some sentence structures you are confident in, while learning the Danish language, will boost the way you learn from the conversations you hear, read and participate in, because you will be able to build up on these samples. In other words, you will not be “locked” and will learn faster, because you will be able to form or process the core and extend it. But if you are not confident in making the core of the phrase, you can never build up on it. This is how it works for many adult learners.
The challenge of learning to phrase a complex and correct sentence, is that many learners are already quite fluent to the level B1 like module 3 at DU3, for example. And at this stage, many incorrect structures are cemented and have already become a pattern in your language production.
It happens due to many factors. For one, many language courses and books are based on the communicative approach to learning Danish. This approach focuses on speaking without much analyzing of what happens in a phrase in terms of functional grammar, while the latter is a good supplement for the communicative method, as it helps to logically connect the utterances in terms of contrast, explanation, cause and result (a common confusion in learners).
Some learners may feel stuck or locked at levels A2-B1, which focus on learning to describe events, facts, issues, situations, experiences. And then, after failed attempts to pass writing in module 4 (on the way to B2), when a learner should demonstrate ability to argument, they drop out of module 4 at DU3 and often try to pass PD3 (B2) on their own.
What you learn in levels A1 & A2 and early B1 is describing, whereas expressing attitude to something at level B2 requires complexity. To express yourself in complex sentences you need structure tools (syntactical tools) to control the phrase. This complexity is simply one of the assessment criteria for passing PD3. Therefore, passing PD2 (rather a descriptive language production) does not automatically mean that you can pass PD3 after some months of reading on previous exam papers for PD3; at least it is not common that such a strategy will work.
A similar problem may arise when learners pass PD3, but are unsatisfied with their grades for PD3. To pass PD3 with 7, 10 or even 12 as grades, you need to show even a more detailed understanding of a complex language (e.g. in reading and listening) and be able to produce complex language with various vocabulary and grammatical tools (in writing and speaking).
Learning language through actually understanding and knowing the rules is probably not the most popular method today, but it has proved to be quite solid so far, especially if you want to improve and grow in how you use the language.
You can learn the rules for sentence structure in my blog Danish sentence structure: a short overview
Do you have questions, comments or suggestions - email to elena@sokolova.dk.