How can I remember the pronunciation of Danish words?

Question

I've been studying Danish for 6 days.

I can have an easy conversation and ask some basic questions like: hvad koster det? (How much does this cost?).

Anyway, I have a big problem: I can't remember how to pronounce these words.

Why? I've been studying languages for 2 years and I continue to study languages and improve.

I'm native in Italian language and I know English, French, Spanish and German, and I never had this problem.

I confused the words in Danish because these words are hard to pronounce and hard to understand.

Can I have any tips to solve this?

Answer 1

There are lots of online resources to help you better your Danish pronunciation.

This is a helpful guide to the pronunciation of the Danish alphabet as well as various words. It's important to make sure you can correctly pronounce each letter in the alphabet to ensure that your pronunciation of Danish words is correct. This link is a total compilation of overall helpful tips for Danish learners, not just for pronunciation.

This is a website with audio clips played for each letter of the Danish alphabet, which you may find more helpful than just words.

Forvo is one of the best online resources for practicing pronunciation, with over 20,000 words with individual audio clips, all pronounced by native speakers.

Finally, this link and this other link both contain helpful guides to deciphering the Danish alphabet in further detail.

And if you're looking for a good way to kickstart your Danish learning, you might want to try Duolingo.

In terms of tips, I'd say make sure you have a solid foundation of the alphabet and how each letter is pronounced. Learn about any language-specific oddities in pronunciation, and if you're still having trouble, try conversing with a native speaker or listen to native speakers online and try to imitate their speech.

Answer 2

Your problem may be "language saturation." You already have five languages under your belt, and the sixth just overwhelms you.

Making things more complicated is the fact that your languages are in two linguistic families; Italian, French and Spanish on one hand; English, German and Danish on the other hand.

There are a couple things worth noting. The first is that Danish is more like English and German than the other languages. The second is that Danish differs more from English and German than these two from each other, and the three Latin languages from the other.

In trying to learn Danish, I would try to "accompany" it with English and German, rather than the Latin languages. But realize that it will probably be your hardest language to learn, because it is "more different" from the languages you already know than any of your previous languages. The closest thing in your experience was probably learning German; if you remember how you did that, it might help your Danish.