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How do you all understand one another

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Roy98 said:
Is Icelandic language very different from the three main scandinavian languages ? I guess it is more understandable for a Danish person instead of a Swede or a Norvegian ?
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Icelandic is incomprehensible to Scandinavians, unless we study it as a second language. It is theoretically "easier" for a Norwegian to learn Icelandic than for a Dane or Swede to do so, but the difference is academic, as the difference is negligible compared to the effort needed for any Scandinavian to do so.
 
Jon Severinsson said:
Icelandic is incomprehensible to Scandinavians, unless we study it as a second language. It is theoretically "easier" for a Norwegian to learn Icelandic than for a Dane or Swede to do so, but the difference is academic, as the difference is negligible compared to the effort needed for any Scandinavian to do so.
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Not incomprehensible, if read you can with some effort figure out what it says. Or perhaps it's just because I have used to live in the same dorm as an icelandic girl and got some experience with the language.
 
Interesting tread and even if most posts are of older date I will contribute as I havnt seen many Danes comment.

I’m Danish living south of Copenhagen and I can understand both Norwegian and Swedish fairly easy and I think that if i moved to either country I would get the language quite fast they are so similar. In my previous job I regularly communicated with our office in Oslo and Stockholm and we almost always spoke our own language. Personally I have a tendency to mix Swedish and Norwegian because I know that there is a difference in the languages but I don’t really know the correct word. So it is actually easier for the other to understand if I just stick to Danish 100%.
One of the things people have talked about is that when speaking Norwegian and Swedish are much more closely related and the Danes are speaking with a potato in the mouth. I can confirm that we do not have a potato in our mouth when we speak, but from my point of view I would say Danish is perhaps more influenced by German (our way of counting are similar to german) and we have a tendency to pronounce one word stop a bit and then pronounce the next word stop etc. But the Swedish and Norwegian language is a kind of a song where the words flow together in one long sentence.

In writing Norwegian is very easy to understand especially bokmål it is kind of Danish for people that don’t spell so good. Danish has a lot of differences in the written language and the spoken and if you write like you hear it you are often wrong. One example I remember from one of my first tripås to Norway as a kid was chocolate, in Danish it is spelled “chokolade” almost the English way but its pronounced like the Norwegians spell it “sjokolade” also many of the words are the same in Danish and Norwegian. Swedish is a bit harder as there is more differences, but I guess most Danish people could read a book in Swedish, it might take a bit longer but its totally doable.

There was also a guy that asked about learning one language and understanding the others. My wife is not a native Danish speaker as she immigrated from Asia to Denmark at the age of 14. She speaks Danish fluently and I would say her accent is about 98% Danish (some people thinks she is adopted from her accent). She has a very hard time understanding both Swedish and Norwegian. But I’m sure that if she moved there she would learn it quite fast as she is already fluent in Danish.

And as a last note, nobody understands the Swedish chef it was newer a real language just sounds that sounds like Swedish.
 
TomTom Tom said:
Interesting tread and even if most posts are of older date I will contribute as I havnt seen many Danes comment.

I’m Danish living south of Copenhagen and I can understand both Norwegian and Swedish fairly easy and I think that if i moved to either country I would get the language quite fast they are so similar. In my previous job I regularly communicated with our office in Oslo and Stockholm and we almost always spoke our own language. Personally I have a tendency to mix Swedish and Norwegian because I know that there is a difference in the languages but I don’t really know the correct word. So it is actually easier for the other to understand if I just stick to Danish 100%.
One of the things people have talked about is that when speaking Norwegian and Swedish are much more closely related and the Danes are speaking with a potato in the mouth. I can confirm that we do not have a potato in our mouth when we speak, but from my point of view I would say Danish is perhaps more influenced by German (our way of counting are similar to german) and we have a tendency to pronounce one word stop a bit and then pronounce the next word stop etc. But the Swedish and Norwegian language is a kind of a song where the words flow together in one long sentence.

In writing Norwegian is very easy to understand especially bokmål it is kind of Danish for people that don’t spell so good. Danish has a lot of differences in the written language and the spoken and if you write like you hear it you are often wrong. One example I remember from one of my first tripås to Norway as a kid was chocolate, in Danish it is spelled “chokolade” almost the English way but its pronounced like the Norwegians spell it “sjokolade” also many of the words are the same in Danish and Norwegian. Swedish is a bit harder as there is more differences, but I guess most Danish people could read a book in Swedish, it might take a bit longer but its totally doable.

There was also a guy that asked about learning one language and understanding the others. My wife is not a native Danish speaker as she immigrated from Asia to Denmark at the age of 14. She speaks Danish fluently and I would say her accent is about 98% Danish (some people thinks she is adopted from her accent). She has a very hard time understanding both Swedish and Norwegian. But I’m sure that if she moved there she would learn it quite fast as she is already fluent in Danish.

And as a last note, nobody understands the Swedish chef it was newer a real language just sounds that sounds like Swedish.
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Influenced by German? Except German is easier to understand for a Swede than danish. And I'd say danish blend their sentences to a single sound a lot more than swedish and norwegian does. I used to have a math lecturer who lectured in danish, it was nightmare.
 
TheDungen said:
Influenced by German? Except German is easier to understand for a Swede than danish. And I'd say danish blend their sentences to a single sound a lot more than swedish and norwegian does. I used to have a math lecturer who lectured in danish, it was nightmare.
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Well you did take German as a separate class at school where you learned how to pronounce the words, word classes etc. I guess that your formal learning of Danish is almost non existent, just as my knowledge of swedish is limited to watching Swedish television. I think that is one of the problems understanding the other nordic languages, we precive them to be so similar that you dont need to learn them in school.

When i say Danish is influenced by German i'm thinking about the way we talk. How we pronounce each word before going on the the next where as i feel that swedish are more fluent a bit like a song with a flow to it. My personal experience is that Danes understand swedes a bit better than swedes understand Danish (perhaps with the Malmø area as an exception).
 
TomTom Tom said:
Well you did take German as a separate class at school where you learned how to pronounce the words, word classes etc. I guess that your formal learning of Danish is almost non existent, just as my knowledge of swedish is limited to watching Swedish television. I think that is one of the problems understanding the other nordic languages, we precive them to be so similar that you dont need to learn them in school.

When i say Danish is influenced by German i'm thinking about the way we talk. How we pronounce each word before going on the the next where as i feel that swedish are more fluent a bit like a song with a flow to it. My personal experience is that Danes understand swedes a bit better than swedes understand Danish (perhaps with the Malmø area as an exception).
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Actually even before that, back when I was a kid, danish was an incomprehensible mess but I had a German second cousin and I could communicate with him well enough despite us having no shared language. While I have an uncle who's danish whom I still to this day mostly just smile and nodd when he's talking.
 
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TomTom Tom said:
Interesting tread and even if most posts are of older date I will contribute as I havnt seen many Danes comment.

I’m Danish living south of Copenhagen and I can understand both Norwegian and Swedish fairly easy and I think that if i moved to either country I would get the language quite fast they are so similar. In my previous job I regularly communicated with our office in Oslo and Stockholm and we almost always spoke our own language. Personally I have a tendency to mix Swedish and Norwegian because I know that there is a difference in the languages but I don’t really know the correct word. So it is actually easier for the other to understand if I just stick to Danish 100%.
One of the things people have talked about is that when speaking Norwegian and Swedish are much more closely related and the Danes are speaking with a potato in the mouth. I can confirm that we do not have a potato in our mouth when we speak, but from my point of view I would say Danish is perhaps more influenced by German (our way of counting are similar to german) and we have a tendency to pronounce one word stop a bit and then pronounce the next word stop etc. But the Swedish and Norwegian language is a kind of a song where the words flow together in one long sentence.
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You confuse Swedish and Norwegian words? It should be near impossible for a Nor to mix Swe and Dan. Granted, there is a large difference in tone between you.
Norwegian seems to be the better gateway language of the three.
 
Solfall said:
You confuse Swedish and Norwegian words? It should be near impossible for a Nor to mix Swe and Dan. Granted, there is a large difference in tone between you.
Norwegian seems to be the better gateway language of the three.
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Well seeing as it is somewhere in between the others that's hardly surprising.
 
Much love to Norway and Sweden.

We danes truly have a potato stuck in our throats.
Swedes and norwegians like to sing the words where we danes just say the words

From my trips to both countries i find that swedish is the easier one to understand for a dane. But it could just be because of those norwegian dialects people have been referring to here in this thread.
It's either that or the thin mountain air that you have:D
 
Well, I guess it's pretty common among close related languages. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish belong to the one branch of Germanic languages, and have been sharing strong ties to each other anyway.

Just like we of the Slavs can understand each other quite well, f.e. All due to certain similarities in grammar and common roots (what is, to my opinion, the key to cross-language understanding). I believe the same works for here.
 
Well, i am a native german living in Sweden. I learned Swedish at the age of 43. so, i have an accent. It is really interesting, but many people say that i sound like a dane. They ask me if i am from Danmark.

Apart from that, i too can understand or at least read norwegian. I can read and understand danish, but not as good. If a norwegian talks slowly, i have a realistic chance to understand enough to know what he is actually talking about. Danish is almost impossible for me to understand.


By the way, does anyone know what skandinavian hell looks like?

-the Norwegians are responsible for the food and cooking!
-the Danes are responsible for the administration!
-the Swedish are responsible for the entertainment!
 
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