Intet
It was a holiday weekend here and I don't have the internet on at home (for sanity's sake). I've got a wonderful book published by Gyldendal on Danish Grammar and Syntax at home. Once I've waded my way through my Danish course I'll sit down and master it (!). George and Alison have now travelled to Aarhus to talk to clients about selling English chocolates to Danish customers (such is the excitment of Bente Elsworth's course). Having said that, it is a wonderful beginner's course because it actually deals with plausible situations. Unlike when I learned French in high school (long ago) and we learned how to say uselesss things like: "there is a red cardigan on the chair".
Hi CT64 :tiphat:
I really enjoyed your statement about not having access to the internet at home (for sanity´s sake) :clap::tiphat::banana::trp::lol::lol::lol::lol:.
I can tell you, on my own behalf, I bought the latest Gyldendahl language dictionary English/Danish and Danish/English during this week to keep up with you guys, the both of them like two heavy bricks for building a house. A lot of evolvement has happened since the school days and particular the past 9 years, so I figured to keep up my own modern English and Danish, I´d better have these like the prodical son returning to the MIMF, mostly for educational reasons and the fun always implemented here, not to mention the only kind of addiction I have known to be possitive.
Towards you and your questions, remember I am not a teacher, not even close, but I am
grateful to you :tiphat::clap: if I can help you in any way, which also help me. Of course the "boiled potatoes"-thing is merely for fun. But actually most foreignors say the Danes sound like talking with a potato in their mouths, you know the letters: æ - ø - å. Btw. your suggestion on "flæskesteg med rødkål" to be the overall national meal? Some people might not agree, but flæskesteg with rødkål and lots of boiled potatoes with fat brown sauce, is the meal most of us eat around Christmas, though many people also replace duck instead of the flæskesteg (from a pig).
About a year ago the Danish national language board within the ministry of education released the results of a test done nationally in public schools, to analyse and discover how well danish teenagers spell and how able they are to use the right syntax. The results were scarying.
One of the reasons for these overall worrying results suggested by researchers, was that the cell phone and the computer as a tool of written communications, mostly using short sentences and various English words, which have influenced the danish language increasingly since the 1960´s, like "remote controle" equals "fjernstyring". Danish shool children use the English "remote controle" rather than the Danish "fjernstyring" into their ordinary Danish language and so on an so forth. English has become the most spoken language in the western world.
This also has an inpact on the ability to maintain spoken dialects, you know the typical language spoken in various parts of the same country by the native Danes - which seems to decrease, because most of us have gotten used to using English as well as Danish, so dialects disappear rapidly.
Anyways, I am here for you sir, so don´t worry if you´re gone for the weekend or anything else. You ask anything, and I´ll try my best to help you out - period!!