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While the similarities between Danish and English no doubt helped you, I think the fact that Denmark is a small country and so has less in the way of domestic media is equally important. You were exposed to English at an early age because it doesn't make economic sense to dub cartoons into a language with as few native speakers as Danish.

I agree and I would like to add that undubbed Cartoon Network is spreading English probably much faster than the BBC.

I'm personally not so sure. Because Denmark is a small country, it's a much closer-knit community than, say, the US. I grew up with a lot of Danish-created media, and paid as much attention to that as I did English-based media.

Any Danish kid born in the 80's (myself included) more likely than not has fond memories of watching "Bamses Billedbog" at 6pm on the weekends.

Also, plenty of cartoons are dubbed into Danish, so I'm not totally convinced about the economic argument. Denmark is a rich country with plenty of money to spend.

I've found that most Scandinavians (or at least Danes) have a pretty easy time with English.

I think it works the other way round, too, though there's an asymmetry in the fact that, whilst most Scandinavian speakers encounter English regularly, the reverse isn't true.

Nonetheless, even though I've never studied any of the Scandinavian languages, nor ever been there, I find it fairly easy to read written Danish or Norwegian. I went to a Christmas market at the local Norwegian church last weekend, and amused myself by reading all the Norwegian signs and inscriptions. With so many cognate words and an almost one-to-one mapping of word order, I could easily guess the odd word that wasn't immediately obvious.

(None of that either supports or refutes the Scandinavian hypothesis, of course. It's just an observation that there are significant common features and vocabulary.)

As an American living in Denmark for two years now, I would agree that that's true to some extent for written Danish, although it also helps that Danish grammar is just not that complex. But from a linguistic perspective, spoken language is often taken to be primary, and spoken Danish is not very close to mutually intelligible, even if you take a very generous view of it. It's nearly impossible for me to even parse spoken utterances into syllables, or produce most of the phonemes, despite some time attempting, because the phonology is just so dissimilar to English phonology. I find the Romance languages generally easier to approach from a phonological perspective (e.g. I can produce and transcribe Italian sounds vaguely competently, even if my Italian grammar and vocabulary is poor).

You're right that the spoken language has a greater claim to primacy than the written - there are enough examples of diglossia around the world.

However, I think you overstate the significance of phonology. Many native English speakers struggle to understand Glaswegians; partly, that's lexical, but mostly, it's phonological. It doesn't mean that it's hard, though, just that the listener is unfamiliar. An American dropped in Glasgow would soon learn to understand the locals, I feel sure.

You say that you've lived in Denmark for two years but still struggle to parse spoken Danish. That seems like slow progress: would it be fair to assume that you spend your time mostly in an English-speaking environment? I ask because I'm trying to work out to what extent Danish pronunciation is hard, and to what extent you just haven't had much exposure.

Mixture of both, I think. The fact that Danes speak quite good English, and don't expect foreigners to speak Danish, means that they switch to English as soon as they realize you aren't Danish, so it's quite easy to get by in English. But I've spent some time attempting to study the sounds, and I just cannot make most of them in a way that Danes can understand at all (e.g. saying place names, even those I've practiced!). To a somewhat lesser extent, I also have trouble parsing them, though I can recognize some stock phrases that I've heard often. Oddly enough, the Swedes I know can't actually communicate with Danes in spoken language either, despite written Danish and Swedish being nearly identical. They will typically switch to English to talk to each other, even though officially they're supposed to be able to communicate (Danes<->Norwegians and Swedes<->Norwegians seem to have more luck).

For an amusing take on the complexities of spoken Danish, have a look at this Norwegian skit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

> Oddly enough, the Swedes I know can't actually communicate with Danes in spoken language either, despite written Danish and Swedish being nearly identical.

It's not that odd. Take threedaymonk's example: English is written almost the same way in New York and in Glasgow, yet an American in Glasgow might have some difficulty understanding people at first. And of course mutual intelligibility between Danish and Swedish will be lower than between New Yorker and Glaswegian.

Written Portuguese and Spanish are also very similar, and while it's possible to keep a "bilingual" conversation with some effort, I (a Portuguese speaker) and my Spanish-speaking friends just use English instead.

Quite often the Swedes have problems with Norwegian dialects or even their own Skåne dialect.

Its quite amusing to see two Swedish people that don't understand each other only to drop in to English to ask for directions.

Native Swedish and Danish speaker here. I can confirm that Swedish people usually do not understand Danish, whereas Danes have an easier time with Swedish. I think Danish is just plain harder to understand, and I sometimes speculate that my early exposure to it has kind of hypertrophied my general language ability (I used to win awards for English vocabulary knowledge and that sort of thing in high school).

Interesting read on Danish infants and their slower rates of language acquisition: http://cphpost.dk/culture/quotdanskquot/danish-languages-irr...

> Native Swedish and Danish speaker here.

Interesting; are you able to switch between them without the Swedish bleeding into the Danish or vice versa?

Obligatory for Danish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQkvqJJvR9U

More here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=danish+pronuncia...

Danes tolerance for Danish pronunciation is way tighter than Americans for English, so if a sound is just slightly off, we don't understand a word of what you're saying.

Regarding the phonology, I'm not so sure they're that dissimilar.

As I understand it, English trickled down from the north of the British Isles. The further north you go in Britain, the more likely you are to hear some of the phonemes you would normally hear on the continent.

From my perspective, being a Yorkshireman, I find it easy to parse and understand the accents (and dialects, even though people say english doesn't have any dialects, which it clearly does) from all over the north of Britain that people below the danish line struggle with, such as thick Yorkshire accents, Geordie and Scottish. For me, that's English. All that stuff below the Danish line is wishy washy french.

Completely agree having lived in Denmark and my mother being Danish.

Jeg vil gerne have en kop kaffe = i would like a cup of coffee

That's my go to for similarity.

There are plenty of examples that are not similar as well. But I thank you for reminding me for hygge/fika.

Well, your Danish looks like Dutch to me ;)

As a matter of fact, people here in NL say regularly that Danish and Dutch are 2 close languages. I'm pretty sure Dutch is not considered a Scandinavian language though.

Dutch is much closer to German to us (Danes) than Danish.

Just for the record, the weird looking "Jeg", which is very different than e.g. "Ich" (German) or "Ik" (correct me if I'm wrong, in Dutch). Jeg is pronounced something like e-I - much closer to English "I".

Is the reverse true? Would I, as a native speaker of English, find it easy to learn Danish?

I just commented about this a bit above, but you've reminded me of a blog post I read years ago: "Why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn" http://www.pagef30.com/2008/08/why-norwegian-is-easiest-lang...

I can't speak for Danish in particular, but I know the Scandivanian languages are all fairly similar. I know a little Swedish and am learning Norwegian and don't find them to be any harder than Spanish.

I had a bet with a friend once about how much a Big Mac costs in Reykjavik, and so to settle the bet I googled for a phone number for a MacDonalds in Iceland and called them up. I was answered in perfect, virtually accentless English.

Why would they answer the phone in English without knowing that you were a foreigner?

caller-id ?

My own 2 cents- my native language being french, I found that I "understood" english much better after learning danish - especially what I previously classified as "weird" (old?) english words like ale (øle), hound (hund) etc.

It helps that you learnt a germanic based language with French because English is 2 thirds of a mix of both.

Learning related languages does help understand the connections between the languages. To continue your example, "dog" in German is also "Hund".

Etymonline says (of hound): O.E. hund "dog," from P.Gmc. hundas (cf. O.S., O.Fris. hund, O.H.G. hunt, Ger. Hund, O.N. hundr, Goth. hunds), from PIE kuntos, dental enlargement of root kwon- "dog" (see canine). Meaning narrowed 12c. to "dog used for hunting."

Expanding that a bit, it says: Old English hund "dog" from Proto-Germanic hundas (compare to Old Saxon, Old Frisian hung, Old High German hunt, German Hund, Old Norwegian hundr, Gothic funds), from Proto-Indo-European kuntos, dental enlargement of root kwon- "dog" (see canine). Meaning narrowed in the 12th century to "dog used for hunting."

It's actually "dog" which is the strange one out. That site elaborates: O.E. docga, a late, rare word used of a powerful breed of canine. It forced out O.E. hund (the general Germanic and IE word; see canine) by 16c. and subsequently was picked up in many continental languages (cf. Fr. dogue (16c.), Dan. dogge), but the origin remains one of the great mysteries of English etymology.

(It looks like dog was applied to what we now call a mastiff, though I'm not sure.)

Since you know French, it makes sense that you find "dog" to be a normal term - apparently it comes from the English (?!) - while you are less familiar with 'hund' and its variants.

again, the speakers of dutch (west germanic) have exactly the same experience, even though the article claims the grammar is shockingly different.

as a native english speaker, my experience in dutch & swedish classes has been that it's pretty much a wash between them for difficulty, so frankly i think this argument goes nowhere. (yes, dutch puts verbs at the end of subclauses. but 'Wegian puts articles at the end of nouns and has a funky medio-passive, so then where are you?)