Morgana wrote:I am in awe of your discipline with regard to studying languages. I've been lurking your log for a short while so I thought I'd finally say something over here.
I have a question about your Danish adventures. I was doing a quick skim of your log and you mention using a grammar (Bredsdorff's?), but have you used any other learning materials for Danish? I ask for a friend
Also your podcast post is just what I needed, I have been struggling for ideas for Swedish listening material. Thank you for making a resource post!!
Really, I'm not all that disciplined, it just looks that way from over there, haha.
I've got Bredsdorff, and I think I did the first chapter. I've actually been eyeballing it the last few days, it is out of place and every time I see it I think I should move it where it belongs, and then I think I could do some formal learning with it - but I don't, and it stays there. And I did some Duolingo, maybe I got through food and animals? I know I got to clothing in Swedish, and I didn't get that far in Danish, so something like that. But that was all. Actually, I've mostly just gone on the strength of synergy and familiar materials to keep afloat in native stuff. I have a digital copy of the Routledge grammar somewhere, I think, but I've never really looked at it. It's been volume of (mostly) comprehensible input most of the way, which honestly probably only works due to the sheer lexical overlap and the familiarity of much of my material.*
For a friend, huh? Not wanderlusting after Danish at all, I'm sure...(I still read your log)
Coincidentally, I've actually rotated out some of those podcasts for some others, but you may not have as much interest in those, as they are primarily Lutheran sermons from an acquaintance of mine and friends of his.
*If you are still interested: Somewhere back there I did a rough low-ball calculation about the amount of lexical overlap I've got from the vocabulary size I have in both English and German. That, combined with the fact that I've very much stuck to what I know, has made it a relatively easy slope. I can read the Bible, at least the modernized translation I have, with no words where I don't get what they mean (maybe 5% of them are "huh? oh, that's like XXX" events). Listening was hard going at first, but I had the advantage of the Morgonandagten (as I may have said elsewhere, the podcast is always one of two standard Matins services that both are represented in Anglophone Lutheranism, so I'm very familiar with the liturgy) and the Højmesse podcast (which follows a standard Reformation-era liturgy [that also happens to be a common setting in in the Anglophone Lutheran world]) so I'm literally able to listen to something where I 100% know what's coming, and often know the tune. I have a priest acquaintance as well who is Danish, and he's good about sharing his sermons with me, and I can usually follow sermons in any language that I've got even a minimal amount of transparency in. Moving outside that realm sees a sharp drop in my ability, but not so much that I find it too terribly discouraging. I am literally the laziest learner, I keep doing things that I can coast on instead of putting in effort with harder things.