Danish With Pops

You can speak Danish on your first morning in Copenhagen. Not read it, not memorize tables, speak it, and keep the conversation in Danish when the other person switches to perfect English. Danish With Pops is a sixteen-chapter spoken course: an English guide explains one small idea, a native speaker says it, you say it yourself in the pause, and the course quietly builds that idea into the next one until you are making sentences you were never taught as sentences. Danish grammar is kind: the verb never changes for I, you, he or we. The work is in the ear, so this course teaches every line the way Danes actually say it, not the way it is spelled.

The course follows a traveler by train from one end of the country to the other: the metro from Kastrup, Nyhavn and Strøget, the harbor bus and a rented bike, the bakery and the hot-dog stand, smørrebrød and a dinner at a Danish home with its four thank-yous, the cathedral at Roskilde and Hamlet's castle at Helsingør, under the Great Belt to Hans Christian Andersen's Odense, Aarhus, the long train north, and the point at Skagen where two seas meet. It teaches the numbers Danes count in twenties, the little words that carry the music (jo, lige, altså, nå, hygge), the reflexes that make a visitor sound at home, and the one sentence that matters most: May I try in Danish? It is voiced by a native Danish speaker, with a second native voice as the server, the clerk, the conductor and the host.

Compiled and edited by Pops. The narration is produced with digital voices.