Let’s face it, some languages just don’t want to be learned. Anyone who has struggled through hours of Danish lessons can confirm this. For the native English speaker Danish is one of the most difficult languages to master, although there are harder ones (Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Mandarin, according to the US government’s Foreign Service Institute). One of the things that makes it harder to master than, say, Swedish is the fact that it’s non phonetic. Take any Danish word and a pair of scissors and you can normally snip a few of the letters out without actually affecting the word. For example, I live on the island of Amager. That’s pronounced ‘Ama’ – with the ‘ger’ bit being silent. See?

For those who do try to get a grip on this most slippery of languages how long can they expect to spend learning it? I have a friend from the US who speaks pretty good Danish. He can hold a decent conversation with Danes and reads novels in Danish rather than English. How long did it take him to attain this? “About ten years,” he says.

Ten years might seem like rather a long time to learn a language. You can enrol on an intensive course to learn Spanish in many countries and come away at least half-proficient after a month, so why should Danish take so long? After all, it is claimed, there really aren’t that many words in Danish (estimated at 40,000 – 100,000 words, compared with upwards of a million in English) and the grammar is fairly simple.

There is no straightforward answer to this. Some people learn faster than others and I have even met people who were able to pick it up at night school in their home countries before even setting foot in Denmark – seriously impressive. In my experience, for every ten people who say Danish is unlearnable there will be one who finds it a doddle. For most, of course, the answer lies somewhere in between.

Does this mean you shouldn’t even try and learn it if you are coming to live here? No. In my opinion, whatever country you are living in you should try and learn the language. You can’t expect Danish people to speak English (although the ones that do are remarkably good at it), and you’ll be isolating yourself if you don’t make the effort.

Another good reason for learning Danish is that it provides an insight into the English language. Yes, all those words that don’t come from Latin suddenly become apparent. The Angles and Saxons and Jutes could probably all communicate with a modern Dane, and they were the ones who founded a good proportion of the English language a thousand or so years ago.

What’s more, learning Danish can be a laugh. You’ll get to discover things like the fact that ‘nipples’ are called ‘breast warts’ and ‘planes’ are ‘flying machines’. Butchers are ‘slaughterers’ (there’s a shop near where I live called ‘The Happy Slaughterer’, with an icon of a chubby man holding a meat cleaver above a smiling pig) and ‘midwives’ are ‘earth mothers’.

Nevertheless there are some factors that hinder your learning of Danish. These include the following:

Extra vowels. Everyone knows about Å and Ø and Æ. Not only do you have to contend with these extra sounds but there are also a host of tiny differences in the pronunciation of familiar vowels depending on where they are situated in the word. When I was learning Danish the teacher made us fill our mouths with water, tip our heads back and speak the vowel sounds without letting any dribble down our lips. Apparently this method has now been discontinued. If Danish were a food it would be porridge.

Course length. Like many things in Denmark, the courses for learning its language are s l o w. I had a Guatemalan friend who went through the Danish language learning system and after a year claimed still not to be able to order a coffee. The suspicion as to why this should be so comes to rest on the language schools themselves who are accused of ‘milking’ the system for government money. Apparently there are some schools now offering more intensive courses. (A pet peeve of mine with language schools is that the books you get seem to have been written for halfwits, or primary school children, but that’s another matter.)

Hvad siger du? This basically translates as ‘Huh, what?’. It’s what every Danish person will say to you when you try and practice your new-found language skills on them. It can be a real confidence crusher, but try not to be disheartened. Even when you get good at the language some Danes are unable to ‘hear’ you if they know you are a foreigner. Not only that, Danes don’t even understand each other, with people from Jutland, Zealand and Bornholm claiming not to comprehend what their fellow country person is on about. Add into the mix the fact that Danes are getting worse at speaking their own language in general and you have a recipe for misunderstanding. I had the fascinating experience of meeting a Dane who moved to Australia when he was six and then never spoke a word of Danish again for fifty years – until last summer when he came over to ‘discover his roots’. After a few days his Danish suddenly came back to him, but it was a crisp, easy to understand dialect. In an aside to me he confessed “I can’t understand what all these bloody Danes are on about, who taught them to speak?”

Fuck. Yes, that’s right. For whatever reason, Danes under the age of about 40 now use the word ‘fuck’ in approximately every sentence. At least it seems like it sometimes. And they expect you to as well. All of them do it, from builders and school teachers and even kids’ TV presenters. Never has a population adopted a foreign word with greater gusto. Apparently it sounds cool. If you are a Dane reading this I would respectably ask that you leave our swear words alone. We constructed them to be as offensive as possible and it took hundreds of years to do so. If you ruin our swearwords we will have to bill you for some new ones. And it won’t be cheap.

Dane brain. To get good at Danish you are going to have to learn to speak backwards, like a medieval peasant. You’ll be saying things like ‘Now go I to shop the’. There is a danger in this. Too much exposure to Danish can give you what I term ‘Dane brain’. The cells of your brain will begin to form new connections and the synapses between them will begin to take detours, forming strange new alliances that can only occur in the left temporal lobes of Scandinavians. You’ll be speaking backwards to friends on the phone and inserting bits of Danglish here and there. I don’t know if there is any cure for this, other than complete removal from Denmark and then intensive reading of as many modern novels as you can get your hands on.

Grammar. Danish has its own rules for commas, which you’ll never understand. Also, they’ll tell you that there are no genders, before going on to inform you that nouns are either common or neutral and there’s no system behind it all you’d just better learn it. Additionally, there’s an extra word ‘hen/henne’ that you have to stick into odd places in the sentence to denote whether something is moving or not. Miss it out and people will look at you blankly and say ‘Hvad siger du?‘ (see above).

Impoliteness. You’ll also have to get used to being impolite to speak proper Danish. In England we are too polite (I once counted eight ‘thank yous’ between myself and the cashier when I bought a newspaper) but in Denmark you must barely acknowledge the existence of the person with whom you are conducting a purchase. It’s up to you whether you want to experiment with the dead-eyed, drooping mouth look for extra authenticity. To this day I have never heard anyone say the word for please (beom? – I can’t even spell it because it isn’t in my dictionary and neither has Google Translate heard of it). Teachers will tell you that the right word is ‘gerne’ but this is not really ‘please’ as such, although it does denote a certain sincerity, and I hardly ever hear Danes use it.

Mechanised conversations. Forget being playful, if you go into many an everyday situation you will have to learn a standard way of negotiating it. A classic one, and one of things they will teach you at language school, is at the bakers. Nearly every ‘conversation’ follows the same course, to the word.

Baker: What should it be?

You: One five-corns bread

Baker: Anything else?

You: No, that was the whole

Baker: That comes to 35

You: (jokes) Nooo! That was so much! (hands over money)

Baker: (To next customer) What should it be?

And so on.

So you can see that there are some cultural challenges as well as linguistic to be overcome if you want to learn to speak Danish. The above list is nowhere near exhaustive. Like elsewhere you’ll have to negotiate a slew of slang and you’ll also need to repress the urge to burst out laughing at the sounds coming out of your mouth (Swedes say that Danes speak as though their mouths are full of hot mashed potato). To do so would represent a major faux pas.

From my own experience, it has taken me ten years to get where I am in terms of Danish. I can hold a reasonable conversation, and I work translating company reports and other technical stuff, but I can be floored in an instant by someone asking me a simple question. The greatest complement I have ever been paid by a Dane was by a bank employee who, on discovering I was actually English, said she thought I was from Bornholm (a small island in the Baltic near Poland).

Praise indeed!