In one of my seminars, I met an Irishman who had fallen in love with a Danish woman. He agreed to move to Denmark and thought it would be better for his job prospects if he learned to speak Danish.
“Why not just learn Norwegian? It’s easier,” his girlfriend said cheerfully.
The poor man did start to learn Norwegian, only to be told by his laughing girlfriend that her suggestion was an example of the famous Danish humor.
But she was correct that Norwegian is probably easier to pick up. Danish is a difficult language to learn, even if you speak its close linguistic cousins, English and German.
While the written language isn’t too tough to figure out, the spoken language is a headache. Danes pronounce only small bits of each word and smash those small bits together.
