Burplefrog!

Danish is a very interesting language. Sometimes I find it sounds really horrible, especially coming from an English-speaking background. For example, I've learnt a whole bunch of words that mean "nice", but none of them actually sound nice. They all sound like insults - flot and flinke and rart. Like something you would yell while giving someone the middle finger. You would call a hot guy lækker (which sounds like lay-kor) and a beautiful girl smuk (smook).

It also really lacks fine distinctions, because one word can have many different meanings. You can hæve et skib (raise a ship from the bottom of the sea) and hæve penge (withdraw money). Bread can hæve (when it rises because of yeast), and a finger can also hæve (when it swells). It's so complicated.

The Danes also have no word for "please". When you draw money from ATMs, the screen often says "Vent venligst", but from what I understand it literally translates to "Wait, kindly", and not "Wait, please". When you're buying something you would say: "I would like a cup of coffee, thanks," or something that doesn't really translate well to English: "Jeg vil gerne have en kop kaffe." It's sort of the difference between "I want..." and "I would like...", I think.

They also use a lot of idiomatic expressions, and it's probably because I'm not used to the language, but I find it really hard to decipher most of them just by literal translation. Like for the phrase "Det viser sig", I think: "It..shows him?" and can roughly grasp that it actually means "It turns out". But for phrases like "Det kommer an på," I'm like "It comes...a på? Wtf is a på?" (It really means "It depends.")

What I really like, though, is the Danish use of compound words. Best is just bedste, but you can tell someone "Du er den allerbedste!", which means, of course, that they are the all-time best. Another favourite of mine is skoletræt, which means "tired of school" in the sense of: "He was skoletræt, so he took a gap year after JC and went travelling instead."

Also it's kind of cool that Danish and Norwegian are so close (the written forms, that is - the spoken languages are completely different) that even a beginner like me can understand both. I was reading a news article that day and wondering why it didn't sound quite right, then I realised it was actually in Norwegian :D