Swedish girl tries to speak Danish - Danish boy tries to speak Swedish 1

A Swedish girl tries to talk Danish, while a Danish guy is trying to speak Swedish. Filmed at Malmö Youtube Gathering 2014.

Me:
#languagechallenge #SwedishvsDanish
Instagram: TheSwedishLad

[jpersonen]

The difference between a swede and a dane is 20 beers

[JohnnyBoy-gm]

Danish and Swedish sound similar enough. For a Swede it's probably like pronouncing drunk Swedish.

[romainetomatoes]

The Danish guy has an obvious advantage over the Swedish girl... Danish is hard for foreigners to pronounce (including Swedes), but Swedish isn't too difficult for foreigners...

[queryen]

Me as a slavic person (Slovakia) what I can hear is that Swedish is much more "concrete" (more articulated) and much more "singing-like" (many ups and downs tones) whereas danish guy sound much more "relaxed/vague" in pronunciation of the words (like he is "eating" the last letters of each word) - to me swedish language seems to be easier, but still LEGO is the best toy ever! :-D

[nlain]

Danish is like drunk Swedish

Of course all of these sentences are just gibberish to an Icelander like myself

[Wordsmith]

Now when I visit Sweden I have to find a way to squeeze, " Din häst har ett fint skägg;" into every conversation.

[snigelosenap]

Accurate representation of reality. Danes are good at swedish/understand it. Swedes suck at danish. XD

[johanhagdahl]

Swedish is not hard to learn....even kids in Sweden speaks it =D =D

[gruu]

I just wanna clear this up :)

When she Said "my horse has a nice beard"
The first time she accidently said: min häst har en fin "man".
In swedish, "Man" with a low key pronounciation means "mane", the long fluffy hair on the horses neck, while "man" with the slightly higher octave translates to an actual man as in a person.
So she wasnt THAT far off :]

[mmestari]

Swedish seems much more easier to pronounce. Swedish vowels are just one short sound, while individual danish vowels are like oeo etc..

[Asidders]

The Danish boy did really well. I'm amazed that they can speak that clearly :DSentences were awful, though.

[SkylineGTRR]

I'm Swiss (who speaks german) and this video is very interesting. Didn't know Danish and Swedish sounded so much alike. I'd like to see a Dutch & Danish comparison. As these 2 languages sound very similar to me.

[johanhagdahl]

a Swede also can say "flott skägg".
it would transelate more like "fancy beard", then" nice beard".

[mamamia]

It seems like Danish only sounds like someone is throwing up, when non-Danish people try to pronounce it though

[gnawershreth]

Reading some of the different comments here I feel like adding my 2 (very long) cents. :D

It's true that our languages are damn near identical and it takes very little practice for us to understand each other just fine, but since both countries became very good at speaking English we tend to just use that which is a real shame. It's no wonder we're getting worse at understanding each other in Scandinavia. We don't get any practice anymore. We used to speak Danish/Swedish/Norwegian to each other all the time. Now we speak English.

I think the main problem for us is the "rhythm" of the languages. For a Dane like me, Swedes sound like they're almost "singing". (It sounds adorable btw. :P) There's something melodic about the rhythm of the language. Very up and down in tone etc. Danish is flat. Really flat. It's almost like Danish is the most basic way of speaking "Scandinavian" (If that was a language). There's no tones or melody to learn. It's just "blah blah blah blah" mumbling along. It's like we write as our northern neighbors but speak like our southern neighbors which sort of makes sense since we've had a lot of trade, immigration etc. with Germany and the Netherlands. Two countries that don't "sing" either.

The Swedes are obviously used to the Swedish "singing" so they have a hard time hearing the different words in Danish I've been told. We don't separate the words in the same way as they're used to tone-wise. It just sort of melts together as a long mumbling stream.
And we have the same problem when listening to Swedish. We're obviously used to the Danish flat way of speaking so when we hear the Swedes' "singing" it can be hard to tell where one word ends and where the next word begins. If you had a Dane or a Swede slowly say each and every word it would instantly become 100 times easier to get it but that's obviously not how people speak in the real world.

One interesting (Well, I think so) thing I've notice is that Finnish people speaking Swedes are *much* easier to understand for me. I first noticed when the Finnish football player Tim Sparv joined the Danish club FC Midtjylland. He used to play in Sweden so he obviously spoke Swedish, but because Finns don't "sing" it's so much easier for me to hear the different words. It's almost like he spoke Swedish like a Dane would. Just Swedish words in a flat rhythm.

A Swedish example is the football player Kristoffer Olsson (Also from FC Midtjylland). He is much easier for me to understand today than when he first arrived. He's still not speaking Danish at all but from being around Danish people and living in Denmark he has just learned to make small adjustments and avoid certain words that are completely different in Danish/Swedish. That kinda goes to show you that the languages really are very similar. He doesn't even have to learn Danish.

[garyarnold]

Swedish is clearly a much more beautiful language than Danish. I think the Danish guy is trying really hard to impress the Swedish girl.

[legoolav]

To make something clear, flott have the same meaning in Swedish as danish, Yes it is not as common in Swedish, but still it is Swedish. One another example is vansklig or Spörsmål. Yes, they are not so common in Swedish but you can use it, and no one can correctly say that it is not Swedish.

[woodwardscreditcard]

Mastering danish is like mastering eating soup while on a roller coaster while having a sussage stuck down your throat.

[Grunk]

Danish and Swedish are very similar, even supposedly closer to each other than any are to Norwegian, if you follow the traditional division of nordic languages into east and west.

A few years ago me and a friend spend a weekend in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, we are swedes btw. When we checked in at the hostel we talked to the danish owner, a very nice guy, and were suprised at how well we understood him.
Danish was far from as hard as we had both assumed earlier and even though it was a bit hard directly in the beginning we got used to it quickly and after a while we understood nearly all he said with only minor need for repeats.

Enbolded by this sudden revelation that danish wasn't a weird gibberish no one could understand we quickly went out into the streets of Copenhagen. Searching for a map of the city we entered a tourist info place and started a conversation with the personnel in there...

...And walked straight into a wall of uncomprehensible gibberish that made Scanian sound like the clearest of Swedish tounges in comparison.
After coming back to our senses from battling verbally with this supposedly closely related Scandinavian language the revelation hit us again... the Hostel-dane had spoken Swedish with us... with only a weak danish accent. Wtf.

It is in text ridiclously similar but the pronounciation is ridicoulously different,

[SirPage]

That danish guy is actually super good at imitating, damn.