Danish

We have two weeks left with the Danish instructor who is being paid for by my employer. After that we can either keep learning on our own or try one of the evening/weekend courses offered by the city. We'll probably do some of both. We definitely want to keep it going. The subsidized courses have a reputation for being a little, shall I say, abusive, but they may provide the push we need to keep improving. We figure that if we were living in France (or Spain, or Germany, or Italy, or any other country where English isn't as universally known) we would both be speaking it semi-comfortably by now (after almost six months). Here we don't have the practice with native speakers that we would be forced into elsewhere. We surely could be more stubborn about speaking only Danish, but it's too easy to fall back on English when I know that the cashier, or customer service rep., or waiter, or neighbor speaks English nearly as well as I do (or maybe better). So far, I've gotten proficient at ordering bread at the bakery or ordering a pizza (food is a good incentive to learning Danish). I even requested (in Danish) that I have the mushrooms on only half the pizza (Alexa's half).

Looking back, we've improved a lot, but there's definitely a long way to go. Most signs I can read pretty readily. I can work out most of the newspaper articles in the free papers that are common here. They're clearly written at a lower level than the traditional papers such as Politiken. Conversations are a different matter. I think at this point I can understand about 15% of a given Danish conversation on TV, on the radio, or at work. Obviously that's not sufficient, but it's a big improvement over not being able even to distinguish words. There are still some people at work who I can understand not at all because they speak so quickly.

We'll keep at it, and fill you in as we go on. Wish us luck!