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.