Customer Reviews

Hugo Language Course: Danish In Three Months (with Cassette)

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I have tried just about all of the beginning Danish language courses on the market and this one is my favorite. It moves quickly and covers a lot of material, so I'm glad I tried some of the other courses first, to give me a basic introduction. This program does a good job of teaching conversational Danish while introducing the essential grammar rules a little at a time. The authors have a good sense for what is essential and what can wait. It teaches many colloquial expressions and rules of Danish sentence construction, so I am now able to create my own expressions and not just parrot back the ones I have memorized. The book has a few misspellings, as other reviewers have mentioned, such as "hi" in chapter one--it should be spelled "hej"--but I catch the occasional errors because I also work with a dictionary. (There are very few). The four cassette tapes are an absolute must. We English speakers will never get Danish pronunciation right unless we hear it spoken by a native. You will find that native speakers in Denmark slur their final t's more than the speakers on the tape (Danes make a a sound on some d's and t's that only Danes can make--it is NOT "TH," as all the books claim). But the extra careful pronunciation on the tape is useful for learning the language. This is the only tape that enunciates carefully enough so that I can tell the difference between words like "dansker" and "danskere." Another reviewer complained that the word lists are not grouped by topical subject type. That reviewer missed the fact that the words are grouped according to which spelling and conjugation patterns they follow. That is very useful for memorizing all those confounded endings on Danish nouns and adjectives. This program makes me hopeful that learning a foreign language is possible and easy with a little daily effort on my part. It is fun! I'm driving my family nuts, talking in Danish around the house. The other excellent beginning course that I am using is from Rosetta Stone--but it is a lot more money.

This book is a good road map to Danish...it does an excellent job of explaining grammar and sentence structure.

What makes it frustrating for a beginner like me, however, is the way it approaches vocabulary. I've learned several other languages, and I like to learn new nouns in groups ("animals" "professions" "rooms of the house")

This book throws huge groups of unrelated words at you as it goes about explaining sentence structure, and I found them almost impossible to keep straight.

I ended up keeping a separate notebook to organize them myself!

Another important point: Pronunciation is the most difficult part of Danish, so I'd recommend buying this book WITH the cassettes. I bought the book alone, and now to get the cassettes - which are really necessary - I'm going to have to buy another copy of the book!

This book is an excellent introduction to learning the Danish language. However, several misspellings are present within the text. As this can be a problem, I would recommend to EVERYONE to get the accompanying cassettes which compliment the course. This would also act as a good precautionary due to the fact that at the beginning, Danish is often very difficult to understand until your ear has been finely tuned to the sounds of the language. Aside from the mistakes, the text gives a simple and easily understandable approach to grammar and also to the vocabulary. The course uses such things as humor and fairy tales to teach the language, along with several model sentences and short dialogues to hear the language spoken at a normal rate of speech. Having the cassettes comes in handy the most with these dialogues. All in all, this is an excellent intro to the language, and one can deal fairly well with Danish after completing the course, as it expresses both formal and informal usage of the language.