Saturday, April 08, 2006

Danish lessons

I finally started Danish lessons this week so soon I will have a better idea of what's going on without depending on others to stop and explain everything to me. I am actually getting a lot better at recognizing written words because there are a lot of English TV shows that have Danish subtitles but the way words are spelled and the way they sound are very, very different.

Lucky for me everyone here learns to speak English in school. I'm actually feeling a bit spoiled because there aren't really any situations that force me to use Danish so it would be very easy to get away with not learning it at all. There are even a few people who are surprised that I would "bother" to learn. But if you can manage to make some unusual sounds it's not really that hard and when would I have the chance to to learn this at home?

The other nice thing about taking classes is that you get to meet other people who are new here. My class has about 8 people in it from places like Holland, Germany, England, Romainia and China. We all speak English but there are other classes with people who don't and we can all mix in the school's resourse centre where they have computers for keeping in touch with our homelands. Well, we can use them for extra Danish exercises too but there's a lot of emailing going on. We spend a lot of our breaks comparing notes on weird things we've noticed here. The biggest thing - and I was warned about this as soon as I got here - is that people here are not very outgoing. Once you get to know someone they will be friendly but when you meet someone new or deal with people in stores or offices they say the bare minimum to be polite and that's it. They also tend to be very blunt about how they say things. For the people who come from very friendly cultures this can be upsetting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Larissa -
Connie Brobeck here, in Kingston. I've been reading your blog, but haven't written to you until now.

I've been unsuccessful in finding any Dances of Universal Peace contacts for you in Denmark. Sorry!

Keep up your writing. I like to read you!

Love, Connie

Larissa said...

Hi Connie,
Nice to hear from you. Thanks for looking into Danish DUP contacts. I'm not surprised that there isn't anything here but you'll be pleased to know I did one of the Dances in a workshop at a youth confrence this weekend. I'll try to write more about it.
Love,
Larissa