Tag: Learning Danish

Finishing the Dictionary

Dear Liza,

I have had a fun few months hunting up pictures and looking up words in my new Danish-English dictionary, and your illustrated Danish dictionary will soon be on its way to you.

The book is called “More than 140 words in Danish” and I made it using a sketchbook that Auntie Bridgett started but couldn’t use for her art, because the pages were too thin for watercolor. They were perfect, however, for my collage (that is, cut and paste) and colored pencil silliness.

There are sections for animals, foods, clothes, family, buildings, numbers, and lots of others. They aren’t perfectly organized, because this was an on-the-fly, make is as you go sort of project. If I had tried to keep all the pictures separate and glue them in later, it never would have gotten done.

Still, thanks to the J. Peterman catalogue, I got some cohesive pages on clothes and accessories.

And thanks to desktop printing, family photos become part of the lesson. Even the silly ones!

And, of course, some art from Cousin Kestrel.


Which looks remarkably like this PHOTO of Cousin Kestrel! Art imitates life, all the lifelong Day.

And today, I head off on the number 14 to the Post Office and send this off to you!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Making a Dictionary

Dear Liza,

With you living in Denmark and me trying to learn Danish, I thought I would put some effort into developing our vocabularies.

To get along in any language, you need to understand how the words go together, and your teachers will know more than I do about sentence structures and grammar. But I can help, too.

So, I am making an dictionary. I will learn words as I make it, and once it is done I can send it to you and it can help you develop your Danish vocabulary. As you can see, I am hunting pictures FIRST, and I will look up and write the words NEXT.

Pictures make everything easier to remember, so this is an illustrated dictionary. The pictures come from magazines and my collage box, and it is organized by TOPIC rather than ABCs.

For example, Numbers…..

Animals…….


Faces…

And like that.

For the book itself, Auntie Bridgett has let me have an old sketchbook that she doesn’t care for. Cousin Kestrel drew in it when she was little, so I am keeping her drawings so it will be more special. I will ask Auntie Bridgett to alter the cover a bit to say “More than 140 Danish words…”

With everyone’s help, we can meet this new challenge.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Thirteen Hundred Days

Dear Liza,

I have been a student for most of my life. I went to school, like everybody, then college. When I started teaching, there were constant classes (some of which I appreciated more than others) to keep my skills fresh.

When Auntie Bridgett fell in love with France in 2008, she decided to learn French, and I went along for the ride. We took lessons with Veronique Sepulchre and Shawn Quiane, and kept getting better at it. We felt very clever.

Then we returned to France and discovered that while we could read signs and plaques in museums, our lack of spoken language skills left us feeling tongue-tied and a little stupid. Clearly, more work was needed.

Enter Duolingo! This is a free (though you can pay and get extra lessons, if you like) on-line language learning site. You learn at your own speed and can repeat any lesson as many times as you like. There is even a listening component to help with grasping a new language racing by at conversational speed.

When you moved to Denmark, I decided I needed to learn Danish, and Duolingo had me covered. (This little guy at Tivoli is saying “We are building something new here.”) So I have enjoyed a double dollop of language.


And as of this morning, I have been on Duolingo every darn day for 1,300 days!

I thank Auntie Bridgett for being a good example and Mouse the cat for pinning me down on the couch until I finish my allotted hour.

And now I need to get this posted.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Danish Practice

Dear Liza,

Learning Danish is a real challenge! I have been working at it on Duolingo every day since you moved to Denmark in August, and I am still at “baby talk” level. I know you and your folks are working hard at it, too.

I started using art to help me learn vocabulary a few months ago.

You know I’ve been studying French for a few years now, and there are words that have been adopted into Danish from French! Words like ‘restaurant’, and ‘menu’ and ‘toilet’ are Danish, as well as English and French. So there are a few gimme’s, as they say.

But those only go so far, and Danish has another difficulty.

Pronunciation!
Danish has TWENTY vowel sounds, at least three which do not happen in English. They all seem to be a variety of ‘o’, ranging from a puckered ‘oooo’ in the front of your mouth to a broader sound that sounds like you are choking on a potato. The consonants tend to get left off, leaving a pudding of vowel sounds that is hard for me to differentiate.

Also, Danish doesn’t pronounce the ‘d’ in the middle or end of a word, but it is still there (sometimes doubled) in the spelling. So ‘bondegård’, which means ‘farm’, is pronounced ‘bonnygo’. See what I mean?

I know you will work hard at Danish and get the hang of it well before I do, since it is all around you. Maybe you can help me when I come visit.

Love,

Grandma Judy

And the French Just Keeps on Coming!

Dear Liza,

This past week, I passed a new milestone: 1200 straight days of French lessons on Duolingo! I started being diligent about it after I retired and moved to Portland , and Auntie Bridgett makes sure I don’t skip a day.

I like learning on Duolingo for many reasons. I am on the FREE program, so it doesn’t cost me anything.

I can learn silently if I’m sitting near someone and don’t want to disturb them, or turn up the volume and hear how the language sounds.

The little green mascot owl, called Duo, is always encouraging and never appears to think I’m an idiot, even when I’m sure I am.

And now, because of my streak, I have three days of cool extra French lessons. I have also had fun learning a bit of Danish, so I can read menus when I visit you.

Seriously, I wish I could have gotten my students as pumped about learning as I am right now. I did try. But I’m not as cute as Duo.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Getting Ready for Winter

Dear Liza,

A lot has happened since I wrote to you in August! You and your family have moved to Horsens, Denmark, and are discovering wonderful things to do there.

I have started learning Danish on Duolingo to get ready for our visit.

I had surgery on my ear to remove a skin cancer, and then a skin graft to put me back together. I am healing nicely.

Summer has ended and Fall has begun, with all the gardening that entails and beauty it brings.

I have planted some Hairy Vetch (a real thing) as a winter cover crop for my garden patch. It should put some nitrogen back in the soil and give it a nice green mulch come Spring.

I wrote a story about imaginary Liza and imaginary Grandma Judy, called “International Adventure Grandma”.

It has maps and secrets codes and I really enjoyed writing it! It is currently being edited by a trusted friend and I promise to bring a real hold-in-your-hand copy when I come visit in the Spring.


I expect to get back to writing this blog regularly, and hope you will come along and see what I’m up to.

Love,

Grandma Judy