“Danish is not a language. It’s a throat disease.”

The above quote is from one of my political science professors. And my throat definitely has been suffering endless contortions ever since the night of August 22, the whole of which was spent sitting on the floor of Sea-Tac Airport after our direct flight to Copenhagen was canceled because of mechanical problems. (We ended up flying out the next day… through Atlanta.) When a few of us DIS kids called our host families to change our pickup plans, we told them to meet us at the Amager campus of DIS, which we pronounced like it rhymed with “manager.” We noticed that one of the Danes sitting nearby was laughing at us. “Amah,” he said. “Not a-ma-ger.” He then patiently fielded all our questions about how to pronounce the names of where we lived and the people in our host families. (This saved us a LOT of embarrassment later!)

Last night my host family served rødgrød med fløde, a thick berry syrup with cream, for dessert. This phrase is supposed to be the ultimate test of foreigners’ Danish pronunciation, as, like most Danish words, it sounds ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like it looks. I just thought for a minute about how I might “transliterate” it, but I just can’t. The last word sounds something like “fleuuge,” but that’s all I got. (It was delicious, by the way.)

Danish, apparently, is the third-hardest language in the world for English natives to speak – after Chinese and Arabic. The biggest problem, besides the 9 vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø, å) that are pronounced in 32 different ways depending on their proximity to other letters, is the haphazard and mysterious dropping of consonants. Pronouncing the first consonant in a word and then slurring together all the vowels thereafter is quite often nearly correct. For example, the town where I live, Roskilde, is pronounced “ROHS-kil,” with the L very soft and the R guttural, like in Hebrew. Good thing I didn’t have to take a cab from the airport!

Anyway, this update needs a picture. Today I went on a DIS-sponsored tour of Frederiksborg Castle, built in the 14th and 15th centuries by the royal family (almost all Danish kings are named either Frederik or Christian, by the way. No Hamlets). The royal family no longer lives there, but coronations and weddings are still held there, and the “Order of the Elephant” (kind of like a knighthood?) is bestowed in the chapel (Bill Clinton received this when he visited). Pretty architecture is all well and good, but the highlight of Frederiksborg is definitely the adjoining baroque gardens: