learn danish

Here’s an interesting blogentry on how to learn a language. Makes me want to just go do it!

Sent an email to the Seamen’s church in my city. Can’t find a languagecourse anywhere in this city (and I don’t want to learn the language from a book, how would I ever know how to master the pronunciation by just reading a book?) so maybe they know of someone who could teach me basic conversation. And see where it goes from there. I hope they can help me!

I’ve now got Rosetta Stone on my computer, which is a language-learning program in which you learn a new language as a native speaker, so to speak. So instead of learning phrases like ‘Hi I’m Janet, and I live in New York’ and having to learn endless rows of new words, you learn the language more naturally through seeing pictures, hearing what is said and then repeating it, in different contexts. So you see a picture of a boy, you hear ‘boy’, you repeat ‘boy’, you write ‘boy’, and then you get sentences like ‘boy and girl’, ‘the boy in the boat’, ‘the boy and the dog’. And thus, through repetition in different contexts, the words get stuck in your head and you learn it naturally. And I know it works, because I started this Danish course last year (but gave up because of lack of time) and I still know the words and easy sentences like ‘the boy under the aeroplane’ (you never know when you might need it!), so it did stick in my head!

Had a wonderful evening last night with my Danish friends from the band The Broken Beats, and now I’m thinking I must really get started on this goal! I wanna know what they’re saying if we don’t talk to eachother in English! And I think it’s such a lovely language, I just want to know it.