The Danish Language

I like Danish, because it is so literal. Everything is called exactly what it is. For example, a bra is called a b.h., which stands for "bryst-holder" (breast holder). Jeans are called cowboybukser (cowboy pants), a hole punch is a hullemaskine (hole machine), and wood is just called træ (tree). As in, my house has floors of tree. It's silly. On the other hand, there are also words that don't make sense at all: the verb for "to ski" is translated literally as "to stand on skis" (at stå på ski), and the phrase "I am a housewife" is "jeg går hjemme", which means "I walk around at home". The traditional word for stepmother is stedmor, but due to the negative connotations with evil stepmothers, the more polite "papmor" has been adopted -- literally, "cardboard mother". Which doesn't seem all that polite to me either, but you can always go with the other possibility, "bonusmor". Grandparents are "bestparents", whereas great-grandparents are "oldparents". Cute.

I like my Danish book because it assumes we're all refugee-types, rather than mainly European PhD students, visiting faculty at universities, and employees of study abroad programs, which is the actual composition of the class. We learn phrases like "I can't come to class tomorrow because I have an appointment with my social worker", and "Zahra's not coming anymore -- she's gone home to Lebanon." At the moment, we're learning words for jobs, and while we have learned the obvious ones like "teacher", "nurse", etc., all of the specific jobs we have learned are distinctly... immigrant: busdriver, cabbie, hotel maid, janitor, and my favorite, "jeg går med aviser", which means "I walk around with newspapers", and is about the lowest of the low in terms of jobs. These are the people, usually drunks and vagrant-types, sometimes just foreign, who try to hand you free papers at the train stations and on the street. It must be a bit disheartening to take Danish class and be told that this is what you can aspire to when you learn the language... It makes class more entertaining though, and helps the 3.5 hours pass a bit more quickly.