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Comment by henriklied | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian, I have no problems understanding both Swedish and Danish. That's mostly correct the other way around as well.

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As a Dane I have not no problems understanding Norwegian and Swedish, but with a bit of getting used to it, and an open mind(1), it's my experience that most Scandinavians will be able to understand each other perfectly well.

1: Especially young people will switch into English immediately, and I find that I have to force myself to not do that when talking to fellow Scandinavians. It's a shame since there's often much meaning lost in the double translation + our languages are quite beautiful, IMHO.

Ah. I didn't realize that Scandinavians already understand each other so well. I'm a Finn who studied mandatory 6 years of Swedish at school, yet I can't understand a word of Danish...

I wish they would teach us something more useful than Finland's regional Swedish dialect and accent -- it only has a few hundred thousand native speakers, of whom 95% speak Finnish anyway :(

Regarding Danish, have you tried reading it? Spoken Danish can be pretty hard for Norwegians and Swedes too at times. There's a common expression in Norway that Danes speak as if they have a potato in their mouth - a lot of sounds in Norwegian (and Swedish) are a lot harder/sharper than in Danish.

Funny that you should mention a potato. I remember my late grandfather saying, that speaking english is like speaking german with hot potato in one's mouth. Btw. I'm neither english nor german, but slovene (living right next to Italian border).

Koper, maybe? :) i come from that city as well but now i live in UK

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