Customer Reviews

Danish: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

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DANISH: An Essential Grammar by Robin Allan, Philip Holmes, and Tom Lundskaer-Nielsen is an abridged version of the authors' DANISH: A Comprehensive Grammar (New York: Routledge, 1995). This smaller version is targeted to beginning and intermediate students of the Danish language.

The grammar gives the basic accidence and syntax of Danish. The grammar is most useful for seeing at a glance how to work with the various noun and verb paradigms of this irregularity-rich language. The book is not a substitute for a proper textbooks, and with the exception of telling time (part of the chapter on the use of numerals) no common situations are treated here.

The "An Essential Grammar" edition contains one section not present in the original "A Comprehensive Grammar", namely a guide to pronunciation. However, Danish orthography is a vicious lie, and students desparately need access to casettes if they are not able to study the language in a course with a native instructor. The book does have use a phonetic alphabet, but this is non-standard. It doesn't help very much that the phonetic transcription for the Danish letter A with ring above is just A with ring above in brackets, since the International Phonetic Alphabet has no such symbol whose pronunciation we would discern.

Matters missing in the "An Essential Grammar" version include matters of stylistics and a more detailed (and diachronic) treatment of orthography and punctuation. If you are dedicated to the Danish language and intend to follow your courses to advanced levels, I'd recommend seeking out the original "A Comprehensive Grammar", which doesn't cost all that much more and which will serve you even after the initial stages. If, on the other hand, you have learnt one of the other Scandinavian languages and just want to get the gist of how Danish is different, this volume may be a more economic purchase both in price and shelf space.

This book is surprisingly unhelpful. For those taking Danish as their first foreign language the book will be confusing; it will be frustrating for those who have several languages under their belt and are familiar with grammar. For example, the genitive case is introduced without a good explanation of what the genitive case is, or even explaining what a "case" is. The phonetics section is hopelessly confused; they use the same symbols for completely different sounds ([e] for the vowels in English 'sin' and French 'les'), and symbols that don't correspond at all to how my native Danish-speaking professor pronounces things. I'm going to check out the Comprehensive version from the library and hope that this book, as a pared-down version, merely suffers from bad editing.

A great resource for those wanting to learn Danish! ALSO good for those wishing to compare Danish (DANSK) Swedish (SVENSK) and Norwegian (NORSK). Remember, these languages have a great deal in common!