Living and working in Denmark (Copenhagen)

[The Swede]

Swedish and Danish are closely related in a very strange way. They understand perfectly what we say but to us their strange guttural gargling is incomprehensible. This leads to the common phenomenon of us trying the speak English with them and them answering in Danish to us.

Norwegian is easier to understand, provided they speak the one of their two languages which is not crazy sounding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language

 

[mgz]

The norwegian language you're referring to isn't a spoken language, it's written. What we speak are dialects. So there.

 

[The Swede]

I know, but they are still difficult to understand. I have always wondered though: Norwegians understand Swedish better than we understand Norwegian. The same goes for Danes. But how well do Danes and Norwegians understand each other?

 

[mgz]

I understand written danish perfectly, and spoken only if they speak VERY slow. The other way around with swedish. Dunno what it's like for danes.

Btw, Copenhagen is a sweet city. OP should go.

 

[misterbear]

Originally Posted by The Swede

Swedish and Danish are closely related in a very strange way. They understand perfectly what we say but to us their strange guttural gargling is incomprehensible.

As an American with no prior knowledge of either language, Swedish was definitely more intuitive to me than Danish - the words SOUND like what they LOOK like. Danish, on the other hand, seems to have a lot of silent consonants or something ... when I was asking for directions to the my company's engineering R&D office in Copenhagen at the Hertz office in Kastrup Airport, I was like "Um, excuse me, but how does THIS correspond to aroowowwowoewewewow. Could I have a GPS unit?" "Uh, we're out." Great.

Needless to say, after missing an exit, I found myself taking a stochastic drive all around Copenhagen for a couple of hours. One of the gas station attendants that I queried pointed me in the wrong direction - ironically, it was the guy who spoke excellent English. The attendant at the Shell Station with a shaky command of English gave me better directions by wildly gesticulating and making clicking and popping noises with her mouth. I'm pretty sure she was just adding sound effects to help illustrate her directions and wasn't speaking Danish to me. Pretty sure.

I really liked Copenhagen though - the city, the people, the overall vibe. You Danes seem to have the largest concentration of TALL hot girls in the world. I kind of felt short over there at 6ft/183cm.