Musti, Get Off My Bed

This is Musti. On my bed. Instead of hers.

She's pissed at me because I couldn't find another can of wet cat-food in the house, and so I gave her dry food for dinner. It's not like she's the only one; I couldn't find any meat in the host family's fridge besides hot-dogs and lunch meat. So I made a free-form omelette (free-form = basically scrambled because their skillet is enormous).

She'd better move by the time I want to go to sleep, that's all I'm saying.

Counting Like Retarded Children

We had our second “Survival Danish” class today— it’s part of orientation so that the people who aren’t taking Danish can at least buy groceries and order food with some degree of certainty of what they’re getting themselves into.

On today’s roster were numbers— always a favorite when teaching language at a beginner’s level. Normally, learning to count in a language isn’t really a big deal; the problem usually comes trying to identify the numbers quickly enough when someone is actually saying them to you. However, because of the aforementioned schism between how Danish words are written and how they are pronounced, counting just got a lot harder.

The numbers are like so:

0 nul (nool)
1 en/et (in/eh)
2 to (toe)
3 tre (trey)
4 fire (feer)
5 fem
6 seks
7 syv (souveh)
8 otte (oddeh)
9 ni
10 ti

Now those numbers in and of themselves aren’t so bad— after all, our numbers have some demented spellings as well (anyone care to explain to me why “eight” has an e an i a g and an h?). The problem is that as the numbers get higher, not only does the spelling convention change, but the pronunciation convention does as well. To wit:

11 elleve (ellvah)
12 tolv (tol)
13 tretten (tratten)
14 fjorten (fiorten)
15 femten
16 seksten (seisten)
17 sytten (soutten)
18 atten
19 nitten

Then things go off the rails once you hit twenty:

20 tyve (touveh)
30 tredive (tralveh)
40 fyrre (fuoure)

And above that? Well, they’ve got a method that sort of goes by twenties:

50 halvtreds (haltres)
60 tres
70 halvfjers (halfeers)
80 firs (feers)
90 halvfems (halfems)
100 hundred (hunnard)

At least in English, you can still mostly see the root number— and then if not, you can hear it.

So to make sure we learned our numbers, our teacher decided to play a little game: we had to stand up and count off around the room, and if we couldn’t remember or got it wrong, we had to sit down. I imagine it sounded something like this to our teacher:

“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Forn?” Close enough.
“Five.”
“Six.”
“Uh…” Nope. On to the next person. And the next, and the next. Seven kills a good five people.
“Oat? Eye-t?” Eight, she corrects
“Nine.”
“Ten.”
“Elven?” Again, close enough, and she corrects.
“Er… thirteen?” Nope. Twelve takes out another four, and by twenty, there are only about four people standing. We’re counting by tens now.
“Thirteen? Tardy?” Try again. This one’s almost impossible. “Dirty!” I can see the hint of a smile at she tries not to burst out laughing. She nods— she’ll allow that.
“Um—farty?”

By one hundred there were only two people left standing. She reviewed the numbers with us once more, before making us play again.

Silent What?

For anyone who’s never heard Danish before, it’s a very difficult language to phonetically describe. People have said that the Danes sound like they’re speaking with their mouths full of potatoes, which I can sort of understand (the Danes, by comparison apparently think the Dutch are the ones that sound like they’re talking with their mouths full of potatoes). The best comparison I can think of is to imagine a Frenchman attempting to speak German with most of his mouth anesthetized— that should give you the gist of it, more or less.

Unlike certain Germanic languages, which are spoken exactly like they appear (German, Dutch), Danish has the distinction of being one of the two languages in Western Europe with the biggest differences between spelling and pronunciation; the other one, naturally, is English (enough, through, dough— think about it, people).

The Danes share our bizarre predilection towards silent consonants that no one else in the world would consider making silent (because, hey! They’re consonants!)— and they do it with a certain regularity that makes me unsure of whether the letters can actually be considered silent, or whether the Danes just fanatically abbreviate all of their words. For example: h and d are silent a lot, d almost anytime it’s in the middle of a word (and if not, it’s this strange, soft d that sounds like something between th and l). Then there’s g and v— g basically disappearing at the end of a word, and v functioning almost like a u if it’s anywhere except at the beginning of a word.

Additionally, their r is not pronounced by flicking the tongue, but rather by some uncomfortable contraction of the throat that, when attempted simultaneously by eighteen American students, sounds as if we have all just gagged on the pieces of wienerbrød our teacher gave us to eat.

Thus, the deceptively simple phrase "Hvor kommer du fra?" (where do you come from?), while actually easy to pronounce, is very misleading, because it actually sounds like it's written. Much more confusing are "Hvad hedder du?" (what is your name?), pronounced something like "veh hither du", “Hvordan går det?” (how are you?), pronounced “vor-dan gor deh”, "Hvad med dig?" (how about you?), pronounced like "veh meh dye", and all the other phrases with the three vowels that I can't explain how to pronounce, because I can't do it myself.

However, the Danish way of saying "hello", which is "hej", pronounced almost identically to our "hi", except with a shorter and quicker i sound. And their way of saying good bye is quite cute: "hej hej". That's right, it sounds just like "hi-hi".

Navigation 101

Imagine if you will, upwards of five hundred foreign students converging on the streets of Copenhagen. They have been armed only with DIS marked messenger bags, and the kind of cryptic directions that you can only understand if you are familiar with the area: “Locate the 7-11 when you exit the station.” Now, that’s all well and good if you come out the main entrance. The only problem is that Nørreport Station has at least three different exits, only one of which will allow you the required view of said 7-11 (whose storefront is currently covered with scaffolding anyway).

Imagine then, the confusion at being told to keep walking, and that you should pass Gammeltorv and Nytorv on your right. Never mind that the map you’ve been given shows no such places— you’re more concerned about the fact that Copenhagen appears to lack street signs of any kind. It is only after an intense ten-minute search of the area, that you discover not only that Copenhagen does indeed have street signs (they are brown and plastered about twenty feet up the side of a building), but also that Gammeltorv and Nytorv are not, in fact, streets.

Factor in the fact that this is happening from all sides of the city, with students who don’t know each other. There are, of course, clumps of students who do know each other, and sometimes, one of them is even carrying the DIS bag. Most often though, you can only identify them by the fact that they look as clueless as you do— and the fact that they are the ones getting run over by absent-mindedly standing in the bicycle lane. The Danes, for the most part, seem to take this all in stride. Whether they are used to this happening, or have simply been trained to display nothing but complete impassivity on their faces as the herds of bewildered and oblivious foreigners pass is not known. What is know, however, is that this means none of them feel particularly obligated to help out (understandably , considering the sheer volume of confused students).

The frustration is such that you give up and latch onto a fellow student, who’s lucky enough to be guided to the meeting place by an actual Danish person.