AlOlaf's Log (Danish/German/Norwegian)

[Elsa Maria]

Congrats on your successful trip! And many thanks for sharing your travelogue. I enjoyed reading it. Someone mentioned the Ribe Night Watchman tour. It is a nice tour in Danish - maybe you can go there next time

I love your idea of booking a tour guide for the local language. I have a trip planned to the Netherlands, and I think I will try that idea.

[AlOlaf]

Das klingt, als hätte sich die Reise gelohnt.

I don’t know if the guy was having a bad day, if my accent irritated him, or if he was just a natural-born dickweed

Es lag sicher nicht an dir, Berliner Busfahrer sind leider berühmt für ihre Unfreundlichkeit. Auch für mich ist das immer wieder ein kleiner Kulturschock, wenn ich dort bin.

„Machen se mal die Tür da hinten frei, aber ´n bisschen dalli!“ Und dann tönt es weiter aus dem Lautsprecher: „Ick hab Zeit, Sie wahrscheinlich nich“ - Sätze, die wahrscheinlich jeder BVG-Nutzer kennt. Ja, die Berliner Busfahrer sind legendär, gelten sie doch als Sinnbilder der Schnoddrigkeit, der hauptstädtischen Unhöflichkeit.

Fairerweise muss man sagen, dass sie keinen leichten Job haben, wie in diesem Zeitungsartikel argumentiert wird. Geärgert hat es mich trotzdem immer, in anderen Städten geht es schließlich auch netter.

Es ist irgendwie eine Erleichterung zu wissen, dass ich nicht der Einzige bin, der unhöflich behandelt wurde. Ja, die Arbeit der Busfahrer ist hart, keine Frage, und ich war froh, nicht am Steuer sitzen zu müssen, aber wenn ich mich bei der Arbeit so benehmen würde wie dieser Mann, wäre ich im Handumdrehen arbeitslos.

So this strongly is connected to things like having a very great workload and so on. But I'd still like to know whether it would be different in some other cities/towns even in the case of a similar workload. Because people's behavior (not telling you all anything new, I'd say) also often is connected to the place they live in and the place they grew up in.

Hmm. Maybe it‘s something in the Berliner Luft.

Thoroughly enjoyable! Thank you for sharing AIOlaf

You bet. Having sopped up enjoyment over at your log for years, I’m really glad to hear that.

Congrats on your successful trip! And many thanks for sharing your travelogue. I enjoyed reading it. Someone mentioned the Ribe Night Watchman tour. It is a nice tour in Danish - maybe you can go there next time

I love your idea of booking a tour guide for the local language. I have a trip planned to the Netherlands, and I think I will try that idea.

Thank you! But I’m afraid I can’t take credit for the tour guide idea. I got it from a Danish Italki teacher named Jørgen.

[AlOlaf]

I’ve had some time to reflect on my trip, and I’m pretty pleased with how I did with Danish. I learned some key pronunciation concepts in my lessons, and the audio files and practice materials I received afterwards are excellent. My conversational skills were rough at first, but I think they improved during the time I was in Denmark, and not once did a Dane switch to English on me. I couldn’t have asked for more.

With German, on the other hand, I was very disappointed in myself. My skills were just plain raggedy, and I can’t blame it all on having just come from a week in Denmark. Even after several days in Germany, I struggled to form sentences and made mistakes of every kind. An example: In the hotel I stayed at in Berlin, operating the elevator requires the guest to insert their room card into a receptacle and quickly remove it. Once I saw a German guy put his card in and leave it there. When the elevator didn’t respond, he looked confused, so I said “Sie müssen die Karte ausheben.” and demonstrated the proper technique with my card. He smiled and nodded, and I came away feeling pretty good about the whole thing until I realized I’d told the guy he needed to excavate his card.

Alarm, alarm! Ridiculous German usage alert! Activate countermeasures! Grey matter mobilized, Anki decks deployed, full saturation grammar inundation underway, ignorance strongholds and scattered pockets of complacency targeted for destruction; standing by to unleash deadly accurate, witheringly idiomatic Yoda word order barrage. Confidence is high. I repeat, confidence is high.

[Expugnator]

Thank you for sharing this wonderful narrative! You seem to have managed to take the most out of your trip even linguistically, especially with Danish where you worked wisely in pronunciation. The idea of hiring tour guides also proved very effective.

[AlOlaf]

Thanks for stopping by, Expugnator! How‘s the Norwegian going?

[Expugnator]

Not bad really, I just need to get speaking more often; actually I feel the urge to speak more (or write, for that matter). My pronunciation might be far off because I haven't worked intensely on it the way you did with Danish, but I feel more comfortable with the language each day. Your previous and current tips will certainly be of good use, and I'm looking forward to posting some attempts for feedback still this year.

[AlOlaf]

I’ve spent the last month or so editing the audio files I received as part of some private Danish lessons I had back in October. With 106 MP3 files totaling over three hours, the recordings contain native pronunciations of the declined/conjugated forms of a huge number of Danish nouns, adjectives and verbs, all logically grouped together by type. Combined with the included PDFs, they add up to a formidable learning resource, and yet I haven’t done much with them, despite the fact that I’ve had them for months.

The reason? In their original form, these files were no fun to work with. First off, each word was only pronounced once, and I like two repeats. Secondly, the pauses between words were hardly ever the right length and, thirdly, the volume often varied from recording to recording.

I initially balked at the idea of correcting all this, because I didn’t really feel like putting in the huge amount of time and effort I knew would be involved, but a little voice in my head kept telling me how unique and valuable the material was and what a waste it would be if I didn’t take advantage of it. At some point, something inside me snapped, and I ended up spending every spare minute of the next four weeks in Audacity, turning the recordings into something I’d want to use. I finally finished a few days ago, and now I have two sets of six 70-minute CDs, one set for home and one for in the car, all with two repeats, correct pauses and more or less consistent volume levels.

Now that I no longer have a ravenous, time-devouring tedium monkey on my back, I’m free to engage in more entertaining activities, such as watching my newly acquired Incredibles 1 and 2 DVDs, both of which are dubbed and subtitled in Danish and Norwegian. What fun! I couldn’t believe my good fortune. You hardly ever find anything dubbed in these languages, let alone animated masterpieces like these. I decided to put all the audio from both movies into Audacity, and I’ve begun editing out the parts with no dialogue. I think I’ll make pronunciation practice recordings out of the Danish versions and listening comprehension CDs out of the Norwegian ones.

Like always, I watched the Vienna New Year’s Concert, and this year’s rendition of the Radetzky March filled my heart with joy. For the first time in perhaps a decade, the conductor got the audience to clap where they were supposed to and not to clap where they weren’t. My faith in humanity has been restored.

Edit: I almost forgot. Incredibles 2 is also dubbed and subtitled in Icelandic.

[eido]

Edit: I almost forgot. Incredibles 2 is also dubbed and subtitled in Icelandic.

Where would you find such a gem? I'd love to buy it. Was it in Denmark?

[AlOlaf]

Edit: I almost forgot. Incredibles 2 is also dubbed and subtitled in Icelandic.

Where would you find such a gem? I'd love to buy it. Was it in Denmark?

Yep. Here’s the link:

https://www.gucca.dk/de-utrolige-2-the- ... vd-p424480

[Axon]

I imagine you could contact your Danish tutor and work out some system in which these files and PDFs could be made public in some way. Whether that involves money changing hands or not, from your description of the classes and the files they are likely to be helpful to many other learners around the world.