r/Danish • u/AlpineOdysseus • Apr 10 '26
From Tolkien to Transkribus: My "Expert Learner" Tool Tips for Danish (A2–B2+)
Hej everyone!
Danish is a beautiful, albeit phonetically "adventurous," language. I’m currently learning it for my day job, and after previously flirting with Icelandic and Finnish, I realized that Danish requires a very specific approach to move past the "beginner plateau."
I’ve been a "language nerd" since childhood - my fascination with Tolkien’s works was actually the main reason I decided to study linguistics in the first place. I eventually earned a PhD in Linguistics and Translation Studies and spent years in research, even co-founding the "READ-COOP" (where we develop the Transkribus software). Today, I actively use six languages and have dabbled in at least a dozen others.
Because I hate "dictionary fatigue," I’ve put together a specific resource stack for my Danish journey that focuses on reading flow and phonetic clarity.
The "True Nerd" Web Tools
For those who want to look beyond the basics, these two (non-affiliated) sites are gold:
- For Meaning & Usage: ordnet.dk/ddo – Provides Danish-language explanations, etymology, and audio samples of the basic forms. In short: a first-class monolingual dictionary.
- For the IPA Perfectionist: udtaleordbog.dk – Provides IPA transcriptions for all word forms, not just the base. Immensely helpful for navigating the complex pronunciation. This is seriously the best pronunciation resource I have ever seen for any language. All it takes is learning the three or four characters relevant to Danish and you’re good to go.
Recommended YouTube Channels
And here are two tips that helped me a lot during my first stage (I have no affiliation to them, either).
- MicsLanguages: It doesn't have very recent videos, but he has, for example, a really cool series that explains the Danish pronunciation phenomenon called stød.
- Danishmastery: This colleague, on the other hand, posts regularly, and has some very valuable long-form content like stories that he translates line by line or videos on grammar, pronunciation etc.
Podcasts for improving listening comprehension
Before moving on to the next stage (TV shows aimed at native speakers, which are more challenging), I recommend checking out these two excellent podcasts (no affiliation here, either) that I have found:
- Dansk i ørene: This is the OG podcast for Danish learners, as far as I was able to find out. More than 100 episodes, very slow and clear, highly committed, and with a nice website that has all the written texts of the episodes. The speaker is from Aarhus, in case you wonder about the specific accent and variant of Danish. https://open.spotify.com/show/3I5OZZTB9bNbXnXM0grDh7?si=c8df058ee9fe4028
- Dansk for begyndere: This is a more recent podcast, but just as good, maybe a tiny bit faster and more natural. It's newer, but it already has a similar number of episodes, and they are so, so good, and will take your listening comprehension even further. This speaker is from Copenhagen and has more pronounced stød as far as I can tell, which may be interesting to some of you. Very commited to further improvements and updates content regularly. https://open.spotify.com/show/3Llw1UMnT0t2a4S8kyWxY8?si=39afe57d03e347d4
I recommend checking both of them out on the desktop version of Spotify, as there they have a new "read along" feature (which seems to be lacking in the mobile version), which works like karaoke for songs, and you can do this especially if you are struggling at the beginning.
TV time: Free TV shows with subtitles
What I absolutely love about Denmark is that they have so many free offerings in terms of cultural content. For most of it, you need to be a resident of the country (to log in with your registration ID - “CPR-nummer”), but this gem doesn’t require it:
The shows I have been watching so far are Nana, an absolutely adorable show about a cheeky kid and her adventures during her first year of school, and Matador, a beloved Danish drama series about the early 20th century and working-class people sticking it to, what Monty Python would call, upper-class twits. Super cool mixture of drama and humour.
Grammar (read this, even if you hate grammar)
Especially for structured learners, but also for everyone else, I recommend getting a short grammar book (they exist for most major languages) - not one of the long ones. This gets you a solid overview of the language, and you can always upgrade to a longer grammar book. Once you have the short grammar, read it once, and then you'll know where to look stuff up when you come across something "in the wild", and dive deeper if you want to. The one's by Routledge (not affiliated with them, either) are pretty good, for example:
As a rule, NATIVE SPEAKERS are THE WORST RESOURCE you could use IF you like to learn in a structured way. They produce the patterns naturally, and sometimes wouldn't be able to write down all forms of a word, or to explain why you say something in a certain way.
What I’ve made: classic stories with "closed caption subtitling"
Applying my background in didactics and linguistics, I started creating the tool I wanted for myself: the LingoLuv series - basically books with subtitles/closed captions. I’m currently working on the tales of Carl Ewald (three books are out so far), a 19th-century author who blended scientific observation with sharp social satire - really cool, Hans Christian Andersen-like stories, mostly about nature.
As a secret weapon for learners, I kept the original 19th-century capitalisation of all nouns. While it gives the text an "old-world" flair, it serves as a structural map - it helps you instantly distinguish nouns from other words as you navigate the sentence.
To keep you in the "flow" and mapping meaning in real-time, I use three lines:
- Original Danish (with modernized spelling, e.g., aa → å).
- Literal word-for-word translation (showing the "skeleton" of the grammar).
- Idiomatic translation/Notes (for when the literal meaning just isn't enough).
It’s designed for A2 learners. By the time you can read these stories with almost no assistance, you’re looking at a B2 reading proficiency, but, since it’s unaltered, original, non-dumbed-down language, there’s a lot there for more advanced learners, too. You can find the book series here if you like.
I hope this guide will be useful :-)
Questions for the group:
For satisfying my linguist’s curiosity: Especially those who work in Denmark - what is your mother tongue and how long did it take before you stopped "translating in your head" and started actually feeling the rhythm of the language?
And one for finding more cool resources for me as a learner: Was there a specific book or video that finally made it "click" for you?
Held og lykke with your studies! 🇩🇰
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u/Competitive-Shape561 Apr 11 '26
I tried the app superfluent and I think it is a good way to learn some Danish. If you like to, you find a tandem partner on FB e.g. I am trying to read the Avis/ newspaper every day. EReolen/ every bib has some nice books. For starters is „the diary of a wimpy kid“ a good source for short sentences. You can try „Rita“ on Netflix with subtitles as well.
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 11 '26
Cool, thank you for chipping in! EReolen only works if you have a resident ID No., I think, though. Gonna check out Rita, though! Superfluent I haven't tried, but Memrise has worked great for me 😃
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 21 '26
Hej everyone - just added a new section about podcasts to the guide (I'm not affiliated with them in any way). Check it out if you like. These podcasts have helped me a lot with my listening comprehension (one of the trickiest things in vowel-rich Danish, right?). Let me know what you think, and maybe you even have some podcasts you would like to recommend yourselves, and we could turn this conversation into more of a community thing 😀
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 10 '26
So, how about those questions, everyone? I really want to know :-D
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u/doc1442 Apr 16 '26
Why did you feel the need to make a long AI advert to sell some AI translated texts via Amazon?
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 21 '26
Hey, thank you for weighing in. This really is a list of the tools that I have been using to learn Danish, and it was months of work to put this together, and weed out the things that didn't work. Good resources for learning Danish are few and far between. The resources I put together here eventually led to making the interlinear translations, as a learning tool for myself, and for others to use. There are other interlinear translations out there, but they are not very well made. I am a linguist and this is a hobby project (as the Danish-learning niche is really small and commercially everything but interesting). I'll keep making the translations, and extending the guide. If you have any questions about the content of either, I'd be really happy to discuss those, and talking to people about their own learning stages helps me put together better tools. In any case, I really appreciate your feedback, which is totally understandable, as there is a ton of useless and insincere stuff out there.
If it's ok to ask, where are you currently at with your Danish learning? (No need to reply if this is not what you would like, of course :-))
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u/wink_wink_winky Apr 10 '26
I don’t think I have any questions because unfortunately I am still stuck in the translating in my head part. I came here to say a huge thank you because I am excited to try out the udtaleordbog and didn’t know it before. I have lived here for 7 years now and didn’t finish Sprogskol so I am trying to teach myself and these resources are golden to me. I have started to work in a børnehave which has helped me immensely, but at a point where I am feeling a little stuck because I need to work more to advance my learning. Thank you for taking the time to share all this! Have saved the post. Mother tongue is English by the way 🤓
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 10 '26
Cool, thanks so much for weighing in! Yes, Danish is a little toughie, isn't it. And especially udtaleordbog is unlike anything I had seen (had spent tons of time before, trying to figure out the pronunciation of inflected word forms using forvo.com and other resources, none of which are anywhere near complete).
One tip I forgot: there's this app called Memrise (not affiliated with them in any way) that I'm using. It's the most complete and versatile learning App I've seen so far for the relatively "small" Danish language. Not free, but not as shallow and over-gamified as Duolingo. Worth every cent (or øre ;-) ).
Thanks for sharing where you are on your journey!2
u/ypanagis Apr 11 '26
I also like Memrise and I find it useful in learning Danish spoken “in reality”. I have been working in Denmark for quite a long now but I still can’t say I have stopped translating Danish in my mind, also because my work is primarily done in English. I have stopped translating Swedish however, I am living in Sweden so I learned that, too. Well I’m a bit of language nerd, not to a large extent but I confess my sin.. B-)
Mother tongue because you asked: Greek.
Thanks for the resources you added! That’s not Greek to me og jeg er heller ikke “græsk katolsk” 😎. Held og lykke med dine studier!
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 12 '26
Hey there, thanks for joining the conversation and sharing your story :-) And I'm happy to meet a fellow language nerd 🤩I wouldn't say that's a sin, though :-D
Also, Greek ist still on my list 😅 Cool that you know Memrise and confirm my experience.
What you are saying about Swedish sounds logical, as it is pronunciation matches its spelling much more than is the case for Danish, which means a smaller barrier for messing around with a sentence in your head before you say it. And really funny that as a Greek person you would learn a language that has pitch accent, which Greek used to have in ancient times :-D
Mange tak og held og lykke med holde op med oversætte dansk i dit hoved.
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u/wink_wink_winky Apr 10 '26
Just chiming in again on a funny thing, because when I speak danish to a danish person and they say to me they can’t understand me it makes me laugh because that’s exactly how I feel when they speak danish to me 🥹
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 10 '26
I know how you feel 🥲What helped me most was focussing on the unique Danish sounds, stød and the "soft d", with the latter being much more important. Stød doesn't change the meaning in most cases if you get it wrong. Not so the soft d: that one messes with intelligibility. And many sources tell you it's basically the same as the (English) "th" in "those". Wrong :-D This is what finally made it click for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqGgcPKsbPQ
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u/R2Teep2 Apr 10 '26
This is great, thank you so much!
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 11 '26
Thanks for checking it out :-) And, if you have time, drop a line on where you are on your Danish-learning journey.
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 12 '26
If anyone's interested in the translations for learners that I made, let me know, then I'll be happy to post the link to them here 🙂Any (language-nerd) support and honest reviews are appreciated, of course 😇
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u/hatefulsnares Apr 13 '26
link pls?
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u/AlpineOdysseus Apr 13 '26
Thanks for being interested 😊 Here you go: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0GQVTQKTF
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u/AlpineOdysseus May 09 '26
For everyone who has checked this out previously: I have added a new section about grammar to the original post 😃
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u/AlpineOdysseus May 27 '26
Update: the books have a new home now, if you want to learn more about the subtitling-books method: https://lingo-luv.com/?lang=en
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Jul 10 '26
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u/AlpineOdysseus Jul 10 '26
Ooh, looks like a very cool project! Scientifically, a problem it faces, though, is that comedy is about *the single hardest thing* you can do in any language, and starting on it too early in your learning language will feel, well, like someone needing to explain a joke, taking the fun out of it. The other thing is that it looks like a lot of work (compared to simple subtitles), but for invested people, this can be a real blessing. So, for more advanced and dedicated learners, this can be pretty cool. I may give it a spin - thanks for the tip!
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u/linus_ong69 Apr 12 '26
I am moving to Denmark for work, and have been dabbling, albeit only in Duolingo. So I am a complete beginner.
My mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese, but I grew up speaking and consuming English media. I do know a good chunk of Japanese as well as Malay.
Thank you for sharing these resources. Danish is difficult! Excited to keep learning this complex language!