Elena Sokolova, June 28th 2025
In this blog post, I will give you some unusual tips on learning Danish
Some learners say Danish spelling is like a separate language compared to the way it is pronounced. This gap between spelling and pronunciation is a huge challenge. You do not need to be a linguist to overcome this challenge. You need simply to understand the regularities or correlations of which sounds a letter turns into depending on the surrounding letters.
Then you learn from context and analogy and develop a feeling for the right pronunciation. The alphabet itself is not that useful as such—I mean the names of the letters, unless you need to spell a word out to someone. What matters is the sounds a letter may correspond to depending on its surroundings.
If you know, e.g., what sounds the letter ‘a’ may correspond to (of course, there might be a few exceptions) when neighboring certain letters. Then you will be confident in pronouncing a new word when you read it. For instance, ‘a’ is normally pronounced like [a] before letters d, l, n, s, t (as in dansk, glas, ananas, banan, ja, kan); and like [ɑ] (before m, f, k, p, g, nk, ng) as in aften, mange, appelsin, kaffe, ham, bank, snakke. I can recommend this material for further study of regularities: Det lyder godt af Kirsten Snefstrup, Lars Schmidt Møller & the soundtracks for this book with a free login https://extra.praxis.dk/course/Qs0S-det-lyder-godt.
If you learn Danish in a language school in Denmark, you will most likely be taught according to the communicative method, where you use the language and learn through speaking, to put it shortly—trying the language out in communicative tasks. This method is effective as such. But in a classroom of 20 students, the teacher may hardly hear your pronunciation in each task you do, and the time for personal feedback is also limited. So you can and need to supplement your pronunciation training by repeating aloud after the soundtrack.
Believe me, I have seen many students who learn faster when they train their pronunciation like this. However, it is not that widely practiced in Danish language schools. Any texts, dialogues from your regular study book or any other input in Danish (even a TV program with subtitles/podcasts, which you can stop and repeat after - not a live one) will do for repeating aloud. The most important thing is to have audio material and the transcript for it. When you see spelling and repeating aloud after the audio version of the same sentence/dialogue/text, you both improve your articulation skills and acquire correlation between spelling and pronunciation.
You can read more about shadowing, which is a sort of this audio-lingual method, here: https://sokolova.dk/the-ultimate-neuro-linguistic-technique-for-fluency-in-Danish. So train your articulation isolated from a real conversation—it is not prohibited by any curriculum, and it is not a stupid monkey method. It is just when you purely concentrate on articulating, because you do not need to think about grammar or word choice.
Trying to pass PD3 (B2 level) six months after scoring a mediocre grade for PD2 (B1+) is not a realistic plan normally, unless you are a language genius. Be realistic about your goals and level. Choose material with a +1 level of difficulty compared to your current level. This keeps you motivated and you avoid frustration. If you are not studying for an exam, choose to work with study materials that have a level description and guidelines. This will continuously level up your language, because normally all the study books are designed according to CEFR levels (you know them from the module system probably, those A1, A2… levels).
Remember that it is your brain that needs to train neural networks, not your smartphone. So avoid using too many translation apps like those that scan the whole text and give you the translation. This technology is good for practical tasks—maybe if you need to translate a contract or understand a complex email—but not for learning, since you save your brain from scanning the text and building up grammatical and lexical connections in the input. The same rule applies to writing, especially at beginner levels. You can read more about learning with ChatGPT here https://sokolova.dk/feel-stuck-at-level-a2-b1-in-danish-and-think-chatgpt-can-help-you.html & https://sokolova.dk/how-far-would-you-ride-on-a-bike-without-a-frame#you-are-smarter-than-google-translate .
It is easy to answer a question with one word or in half a phrase—also, it is natural, that’s the way we often speak. However, if your goal is to pass a language exam or sound well-educated eventually in Danish, make it a habit to construct full, correct sentences. There is nothing more difficult than to unteach yourself fluent, ungrammatical speech, because the brain has automated many wrong structures and chunks. Want to learn more about the sentence structure? Check out https://sokolova.dk/danish-sentence-structure-short-overview.
Invest time installing an app or buying a paper dictionary to check the grammar of new words and their meaning, especially if you need to pass an exam, where the use of digital dictionaries is not allowed. Google Translate can work for many tasks as a dictionary, but it may also result in part of speech mistakes; situations like looking up ‘access’ as a verb, and getting the variant adgang, which is ‘an access’—a noun. So looking for an equivalent in Danish without checking parts of speech may again compromise the quality of the texts you write and your understanding of the input. Also, a good Danish-Danish dictionary may help you learn different meanings of the same word, and it shows grammatical forms of the word. See this good video to learn more about a Danish-Danish dictionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTqMcIvmGng.
If you want to improve your vocabulary, make it a habit to integrate new words rather than using ‘give’, ‘be’, ‘take’, ‘go’, ‘work’, ‘do’, ‘have’ in all possible situations. There are plenty of synonyms for give, e.g. tilbyde, sikre, tildele, overrække, yde, ‘medføre’, depending on the context. This strategy will help you express your ideas in a detailed and precise way, and while finding a more suitable synonym, you will simply learn more new words and their meanings.
Any known context sounds easier in Danish, so choose a book you have read or a movie you watched in your native language/English, then read or watch it in Danish. It will save you time struggling with the feeling that you do not understand the core, and you will rather focus on the form than on the context.
Choose some classics from https://ereolen.dk/. Almost all the cartoons about Tintin are e.g. now available at dr.dk https://www.dr.dk/drtv/serie/tintin_418974, a free account to login is needed. There are more episodes of the cartoon on dr.dk than on Netflix. Boost your Danish with some quality cartoons.
Not coincidentally, many study materials are designed around topics and chapters. It’s just easier to systematize new words and structures around the same topic, so extend and elaborate your reading, speaking, and watching around one topic at a time. You learn Danish by learning samples of the language, you can’t learn everything at a time.
Finally, if you want to pass a certain exam or get high grades, study the information about the exam and the criteria for passing before making a study plan. Then while sitting the exam, answer the question you are asked. Sometimes learners speak fluent colloquial Danish, but they simply do not follow the instructions in the exam task, give vague answers, argue not to the point, or simply their level does not correspond in criteria to the aspiration level.
While learning Danish do not get demotivated after several months or sometimes years, that your listening skills are poor and managing ping-pong small talk conversations is often stressful. Imagine that you need to decode a phrase you hear in meaningful chunks, for that you need to have a solid vocabulary, minimal grammar understanding, and then be confident understanding assimilations and reductions. So listening comprehension requires a lot of other competences and settles down as the last skill.
Do you have questions, comments or suggestions - email to elena@sokolova.dk.