Is Danish Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

For English speakers, Danish is regarded as a relatively easy language to learn. It is very similar in many ways to English which gives you a considerable head start in learning it. However, languages are always challenging to learn, and learning Danish will take a lot of time and study—it is only easy in relative terms.

Danish is about as closely related to English as a separate language can be, and this makes it much easier for an English speaker to learn than many other languages.

At the same time, there are still many aspects of Danish that are going to be tough, and you shouldn’t prepare yourself for a walk in the park.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Danish to learn?

It’s best to start by saying that learning a language is never easy.

No matter how closely related to your own language it may be, it is going to take time and difficulty to learn a foreign language, even Danish.

Having English as your first language will be a big help in many ways, but you should never go into a language learning project expecting to have an easy time of it.

It will take months of study and even once this is done, if you are looking for full fluency, you can expect a great deal more time than this absorbing and speaking the language before you are at the point of fluency.

With all this said, Danish is relatively straightforward for an English speaker to learn.

One helpful way to understand why is by looking at language families.

Danish and English are both part of the Germanic language family, with English being West Germanic and ultimately Anglic.

Danish, on the other hand, is Northwest Germanic and ultimately East Scandinavian.

Still, the two are very closely related, but it’s important to put this context—there’s still a good deal of difference between the two.

Being this closely related, you’ll notice a great deal of similarities between the two languages, in terms of grammar and vocabulary.

You’ll notice a much greater deal of differences, of course, but nonetheless, these similarities will be a big help and will make the learning process considerably easier.

As you can see, it’s a fairly complex question—it is never as simple as just saying a given language is easy to learn.

Understanding how long it takes to learn is a helpful metric, too, though.

How long will it take to learn Danish?

There are essentially two parts to this question, so let’s first consider how long you can expect to spend studying the language initially.

The FSI categorizes languages on the basis of how long you can expect to spend studying them to get to the point that you’re able to conduct yourself in the language on a daily basis.

There are five categories, with category one being the easiest and shortest learning time languages.

Danish, you’ll be relieved to hear, is a category one language, which means you can expect to spend around 24 weeks of continuous study to get to the point that you’re able to use the language on a daily basis.

This is certainly a relatively short period of time compared to other languages, but it’s still rather a long time to spend studying any one thing.

Even once you’ve completed this period of study, though, you are far from fluent in the language.

If you are aiming for full fluency, you can expect to spend a further 3-5 years living in the country and using the language every day before you are at the point of fluency.

Learning a language takes time, then, and you need to be prepared for that if you are serious about learning it.

What makes Danish tough to learn, then?

Why is Danish difficult to learn?

Though it is overall much easier than other langauges, there are still elements of Danish that will be tough for an English speaker.

One common aspect of Danish that people point to as a reason for why it is so difficult is the abundance of vowels in the language.

Danish has 224 different vowel sounds, whereas English only has around 14.

There are, then, a lot of different sounds to learn and this will take time.

Pronunciation can often be a tough point for English speakers to some extent, too, though it’s certainly a good deal easier than in other languages.

Is it easier to learn Danish or Swedish?

Among the Scandinavian languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, Danish is generally regarded as the toughest to learn.

Again, while we’ve stressed that Danish is relatively easy, this is taking languages as a whole—compared with its immediate neighbors, there are many aspects of Danish that make it tougher to learn.

Danish is certainly a good deal harder to learn than Swedish, then, and even Swedish is still considered quite a difficult language to learn.

Again, you’ve not got an easy task with learning any language.

So, again, though English and Danish are closely related and, superficially, on the face of it, learning is relatively easy, you are still going to have a tough time learning Danish.

You’re going to have to commit yourself to a long period of study and an even longer period to gain fluency, and though your English will give you a big help in many ways, it’s ultimately more complicated than just saying it will be easy to learn Danish because it is closely related to English.

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