I recently went to Copenhagen on business and prepped with a How to Speak Danish book and CD and was surprised at how difficult it was. I easily learned Spanish later in life after having taken French in high school but Danish is at a whole other level. It’s not the grammar but the pronunciation, which is brutal. In fact I would generally agree with this guy’s theory that the grammer is remarkably similar to English. English is sort of like a scandinavian language with a simplified accent. The Danes I know had no problem learning English but I found it much tougher the other way around.
Barry Farber, radio guy, suggests learning Norwegian first. He says it’s easier than Danish or Swedish, and once you know Norwegian, picking up those other languages won’t be so hard. Some people say Swedish is easier, but Norwegians have less trouble understanding the other Scandinavian languages than Swedes or Danes do.
Yes grammar and conjugation of verbs is very simple but they speak with a “kartoffler i halsen” (potato in throat). Once you begin to hear it is relatively easy to understand but speaking is another matter. I had only been there for three months when all of a sudden I started to understand. I was doing conjugation flashcards everyday and memorizing paragraphs attempting the perfect accent. Suddenly it happened.
I listen to a Danish Jazz station every day to hear the language regularly. Went there for Christmas four years ago.
I studied Danish briefly in college (an extracurricular class taught by a Danish exchange student) in preparation for a trip to Denmark, and I didn’t find the pronunciation difficult at all. The structure of Danish is similar to English, and I picked up basic Danish quickly. However, there aren’t as many Danish cognates of English words as you might imagine. Studying Danish serves to remind the student just how much of our lexicon descends to us from Latin, via French.