Level 2 is going better the second time around. I think half of the improvement is that I understand enough vocabulary to be able to focus on grammar, pronunciation, and the rest. The other half is that the teacher is a nice guy instead of an abusive martinet. He has yet to issue any instructions on when we may or may not go to the bathroom or on how to take off our coat first if entering the classroom late. And when you make a mistake, he makes a slight grimace and says, "næste," (I think), which means, almost (I think). And then you try again. This is much more pleasant that the shouting and fist-banging that accompanied mistakes in the last class.

Assorted quotes and tidbits from class:

I have in my notes that "if you put [pronounce] an l on that, Germans in black coats, raincoats, will come for you in a black car on a rainy Monday" and take you away, but I don't have in my notes any reference to which word he was talking about.

I've found one word in Danish that shares an obvious root with the English but is simpler: neighbor is nabo.

The Estonian girl whose name I thought was Xena (as in the warrior princess) is actually Signe. In Estonian the gn is pronounced as in English, "zeen-yah," but apparently Danes can't manage that so it's just "zee-nah" here. So now I've learned how to pronounce Signe and Solveig. Who says travel is useless?

During a grammar exercise I added a clause in the wrong place (Jeg bor i Danmark meget længe nu, or Jeg bor meget længe i Danmark nu). The teacher thought about it for a while and decided that that word order sounded as if the speaker were on acid. Lars looked at the sentence and declared that there was no problem with that word order. Draw your own conclusions.

Under pressure during a listen-and-repeat exercise, one student mis-repeated thusly: "Jeg sidder og tænker på, hvad jeg skal tænker på." I'm thinking about what I will think about.

There's a rumor that the Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was caught in women's clothing. A rumor I'm happy to repeat here.

The closing titles for Two for the Road are very short, and I was seated near the door, and the audience was all film lovers and mostly old people, so they tended to stay for the credits, and so, by rare happenstance, I was almost the first out of the theater. Walking to the door, the one lady in front of my commented, and if she was speaking English she was saying something about the times in the movie.
"Hvad?" I replied, instintively.
She said something that was almost certainly in Danish.
I said something indistinct, even to me, which I think might have contained the word "Engelsk."
She said something and I had no idea what language it was.
I said "what?"
She said, "never mind," which I understood quite clearly although I couldn't tell you what language she said it in.

The old saw is that people can remember seven things, plus or minus two. The original research paper doesn't quite say that. It says, " the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember." It's not that we can only remember seven things, it's more that we can only (barely) process seven random things. You can remember all fifty US states if you work at it, but if I read you a list of rural Chinese townships you (if you are in the 5/6 majority of the world) will be a bit pressed to remember the sounds of even seven, much less reproduce, spell, or locate them. To get past the seven barrier, we use all sorts of memory tricks, usually unconsciously. Entire phrases can count as one - you can remember "noon," "9 am," "next Tuesday," and "July 4, 1776" about equally well - each one in a single chunk.

I spend a lot of time in class surfing the boundary between adequate and inadequate chunking. When I understand all, or all but one of the words in a sentence, I can rattle it off, modify it, reply to it, recognize it, no problem. When I memorize sentences, at first I'm completely off but eventually I hit a threshold and my mistakes change from complete missing clauses and incomprehension to putting "min venner" (my friend) when the actual sentence is "han" (him), because I am recalling the meaning of the sentence (easy), not a sequence of marks on paper (hard). I'm really bad at picking up vocabulary; often I can feel a word slipping right through my head and I know it won't, it can't stick. It took me over a year - I wasn't even in China any more - before I could remember that bus is "qiche." I've eaten my own height, if not weight, in "double snail's toe" pastries from the corner bakery (not the one across the street, it sucks; the one three blocks away in Christians Torv) and I ask them what it's called every time and you could take away all my chocolate and I still couldn't tell you what it's called in Danish.

So about half the time I do okay in class and the other half I just fail, hard, over and over, and when I fail it's usually because I don't know all the words and so I simply cannot do the substitution drills or the grammar exercises. Yes, I understand that verb has to be duplicated when changing the sentence into a "Først ... og så ..." (First ... and then ...) structure. I just don't know which, out of three words I don't recognize, is the verb. And each time the teacher hums the theme from Jaws (I'm not making this up) one more word that I knew at home disappears from my working vocabulary. (I gather that some people work well under pressure. I've never claimed to be one of them; maybe that's because I plan a lot or maybe that's why I plan a lot.)

The point of this ramble is that Wednesday, the entire class collectively failed to prepare adequately and so the substitution drill was a miserable failure and had to be aborted, and our class was out half an hour early. At least, that's how the teacher saw it. I found that conclusion unlikely. I know I studied about my usual amount, and if that's inadequate to complete these exercises in class then I'll just repeat every level and refuse to apologize for it. I would like to offer up this comparison. The way these drills work is that the teacher reads and we all repeat the full sentence, and then the teacher reads one word or clause to a student and the student repeats the entire sentence, substituting the new word(s) where appropriate. This is one from lesson 5:

Det er præcis    det samme som personummer.

       næsten

       ikke helt

       slet ikke

(That is [precisely | nearly | not quite | not at all] the same as a person-number.) The teacher says, "slet ikke," and you say, "det er slet ikke det samme som personnummer." And here's one from lesson 8:

Det er svært at koncentrere sig, efter at man har set en god film.

                                 efter at man har været i biografen.

                                 efter at man har været på kursus i 3 timer.

                                 efter at man har været ude i universet.

(It is difficult to concentrate, [after one has seen a good film | after one has been to the movies | etc]). Yeah, must have been the students' fault. We're all lazy no-goodniks who, aside from showing up for 3.5 hours of class three nights a week and doing 2-3 hours of homework and prep three other nights, really don't put any effort into learning Danish and probably don't deserve to speak it. The problem certainly couldn't lie in teaching materials that ask students to simultaneously master substantial amounts of new vocabulary, new pronunciation, and new grammar each and every lesson, could it?

The reality, of course, is that we get overloaded with new items, and our chunking breaks down. These sentences have thirteen words. At least two or three have tricky pronunciation. The fact that the "at" is pronounced here, whereas it is silent when it comes directly after a comma, is an item, as is the fact that the "at" is pronounced "uh." I think "har været" is past perfect tense of "er" (be), but I had to scan the vocab pages of six previous lessons before finding it to confirm, and that was after I saw it in written from. "Koncentrere" (concentrate) is a reflexive verb, hence the "sig," which is a reflexive pronoun but I don't remember which one; maybe it's "myself." Don't forget that it's pronounced "sai" (like the English word sigh - hey, new mnemonic!) because the g causes the i to drop three levels to an a, and then becomes an "i" sound itself, as long as the word is emphasized. If it's not emphasized, then I think it becomes just "suh."

So there could easily be 15 items to remember in this sentence, and I don't see how even a good student is going to have more than half of them down pat, so you're still left with 7 items - right at the threshold. Now please do ten of these in a row without making a mistake. Of course, if you are a fluent Danish speaker then you can probably chunk the entire first clause as one item, and chunk a bunch of the helping verbs and prepositions, and you are down to a very manageable 3 or 4 chunks per sentence, and you wonder why nobody can repeat it back to you.

In fact, I don't mind the insanely aggressive lessons. I'd rather get pushed, fail to master it all, and repeat, then breeze through simpler stuff and learn less. What I do resent is the attitude that I feel just below the surface (and emerging from time to time) of four of the five teachers I've had so far, that because we aren't speaking fluent Danish already we are somehow weak or stupid or immature, and should be browbeaten and cajoled. I guess this is a professional hazard in language teaching, and I know from my own teaching and from interactions with people who don't speak fluent English that it's really hard to separate fluency and perceived intelligence. But it's disappointing that the top language school in as competent a country as Denmark can't manage to train their teachers past this point. On the other hand, we also got a handout about new class fees (most of us pay nothing, as class is subsidized by the state - though I'm a taxpayer so it's not exactly free) which said, among other things, "please remember that your attendance rate and absence rate is recorded and may be used by the authorities if you apply for permanent residence permit or Danish citizenship," and if that doesn't make American readers want to go out and hold the line against the wave of "English-only" legislation and xenophobia, then nothing will and we have little to be proud about.

What could we have done in class? We could have done more of them as a group, to give us time to repeat and memorize the clauses in class and without individual pressure. We could have interrupted the sequence of public failures before they became contagious and even the best students were completely helpless. We could have opened our books so that we could read along. But no, it was a failure of will and ability and preparation on our part, and there was nothing to be done but to move on.

I'm really learning a lot that will help me the next time I do a teaching stint.

Going to a fast-paced language school like KISS, you get to have a lot of different teachers in a short time. I've had five in three months, although two were just for one class each. And if you pay attention, you can learn a lot about teaching. (All of the teachers are infinitely better than I was in China, but all of the teachers at KISS have professional qualifications and months of training.) I try to avoid jumping to conclusions about people, and I usually fail. And often I'm wrong - I was in despair after the first day of the phonetics class but Bent has turned out to be my favorite KISS teacher so far.

Anyway, when you're in a language class and paying attention, there's a lot of different things you could or should be paying attention to.

• Mentally converting written Danish words to the correct pronunciation
• Including glottal stops and gutteral vowel sounds
• Emphasizing the appropriate words
• Listening to your own pronunciation
• Listening to the teacher's pronunciation
• Knowing the correct positioning of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Knowing the actual position of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Remembering memorized sentences
• Remembering the meaning of words
• Remembering rules of grammar
• Applying rules of grammar
• Knowing your turn in the class sequence
• Knowing the current class modality (is the teaching echoing what we say or echoing only words we did wrong)
• Determining whether the word the teacher just said to you was a correction of your pronunciation in the last sentence or your prompt for the next sentence.

In order to function in class, you need to be doing at least four or five of these things at once, and in order to excel you need to be doing almost all of them. It's impossible to do them all consciously, so you have to prepare as much as possible so as to automate many of these things and then just think about one or two current problems plus whatever the teacher directs your attention towards. On a good night, on material I've prepared well for, I can just about pull it off - keeping three or four threads active semi-consciously and focusing on one at a time. If you are doing all of this and you make a mistake, you usually have the correct answer somewhere in your head, and to retrieve it you simply need to be nudged in the right direction - given a hook or a clue that your subconscious can use to focus your thinking mind in the right direction. And sometimes our current teacher does this. Unfortunately, her first reaction to mistakes is usually one or more of: gasps and dirty looks, banging her fist on the table, feigned shock, or "criminal!" or "do you want to make your teacher cry?" The effect of any of these, and especially of the fist-banging, is simply to trigger the fight-or-flight response. Since humans didn't evolve in an environment where pronuciation and grammar were immediate life-and-death concerns, the human brain doesn't typically retain this information when reverting to fight-or-flight. It flushes everything that doesn't pertain to possible incoming sharp teeth or claws, escape routes, or physical counter-attack. I'm amazed when any student ever gets anything right on the second try - I'm usually only able to by saying things that I know are wrong - which triggers a fist that I can ignore because my act of choosing to say something wrong grants me a bit of control - while working my way back to the correct answer. It's probably not the best way to pass the class, but it's the best I can do to perform the learning act in this environment.

So, despite my efforts not to jump to conclusions, as of week three in this latest class I'm willing to say that I don't care for the teacher.

I'm typing the Danish numbers, cardinal and ordinal up to twenty plus every tenth up to a hundred (hundrede), into my language machine (you can play along at home - follow the link in the title, add some words to your personal list, and take a test), and I recognized a pattern. We have a test tomorrow on the numbers, in addition to the standard memorize-fifteen-sentences test, and when the test was announced and then the announcement repeated during the course of last week, I experienced and witness a sequence of reactions. First, denial of meaning - she said there would be a test and we filed that away but pretended that it didn't matter yet. Then anger - why are these numbers so stupid? (They're not much more irregular than English numbers, where eleven, twelve, thirteen, twenty, and thirty are nothing to brag about.) Then despair: I'll never make it; I'll never pass the test, I'll never learn the language. Then numbness - you just do it, and do it over and over. Acceptance may come next, but I've not gotten that far.

See the pattern? That's right, language learning is emotionally identical to grieving.

I've finally finished the remedial phonetics stuff and am back on the main (fast) track at Danish school, meaning Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 5:15 pm to 8:45 pm. I ran into somebody who was in my original class; he's now in level four. I'm starting level 2. He said most of that class did not pass, so I feel a bit better. In my heart I still believe that missing that connection at SFO by a few minutes (the plane was still at the gate!) cost me six weeks. Anyway, the new class is fine. I actually grew fond of the people in my phonetics class, but I don't see them any more because they are all on the Tuesday/Thursday track. My friend Qin Xia changed to M/W/F for level two but she got put into the other level 2 class, so we only see each other in the hallway.

With level 2, lession 3, we are finally starting to count above fifteen. If you know anything about Danish and you have been following this story, you are probably eager to hear what I have to say about Danish counting. I vaguely remember the psychotic American helicopter pilot we met in Malmö ranting about Danish numbers, but he was the ranting sort.

Anyway, all I'm going to say is this. In Danish, 75 is pronounced with the syllables: "fem-o-ha-fears." This is written femoghalvfjerds, and has the meaning, 'five, plus half of a twenty less than four twenties'. That's all I have to say about Danish numbers.

In my opinion, a best-of-breed language would use Chinese numbering, which is strictly regular, strictly base ten, and comprises almost exclusively monosyllablic components (not counting a few dipthongs).

A traditional programmer's joke says that, if a problem must be solved in four hours, a real programmer will spend three hours and fifty-five minutes writing a program that can solve the problem in five minutes. We had a vacation from Danish class last week, and I spent most evenings working on my vocabulary training tool. I finished it last night at 11:30 pm and put in some sample data from lesson 8 - I may or may not have a test on lessons 8 and 9 tonight.

As any mathematician can tell you, now that I've demonstrated that a solution for learning Danish exists, the problem is solved and I can stop work. At least, that's what I'll say if I fail the next test.

Denmark's creation myth includes the flag's origin story: it fell from the sky on June 15th, 1219, landing on or near the king, who was busy liberating Estonia (from the Estonians, presumably.) English speakers learning Danish tend to invent similar creation myths for the language. My own theory is that Danish is the result of Vikings spending a few too many seasons in Albion, learning Old English while drunk, and bringing the result back. The most recent piece of evidence is this sentence from Lesson 9:

OK, så send mig en e-mail.

An alternate theory is that there is no such thing as Danish: They all speak English and they just fake this stuff to seem more exotic to British/American/Australian tourists' daughters.

Our usual Danish teacher, Bent, was sick today, so we were split into half and merged with regular level 1 classes. Apparently there are two level 1 classes on the same schedule as our phonetics class, so I wasn't just recycled to phonetics out of convenience, I was explicitly placed in phonetics before I can proceed to level 2. Anyway, the teacher in the new class was more confident than Bent and at first it was a nice change (not that Bent isn't confident, but his body language sometimes undermines his authority) but later it seemed like this guy had a bit more of an edge whereas Bent is invariably polite and exceptional at responding to negative student reactions with more positive teaching. It did mean that the semi-lame 2 minute presentation I prepared as homework was moot, and I'll have all weekend to master the new vocabulary Lars gave me so I can use it in a more extemporaneous presentation instead of a memorized speech.

One student in the class, Tordi, I thought introduced himself as French, presumably a Turkish immigrant since he doesn't look especially Gallic or speak English with a French accent. He is older, in his fifties or maybe sixties, and often struggles in class. In particular his English is very weak, so he doesn't always understand instructions. He was speaking Russian with Andrei the Russian at the second break so I chatted, mostly in English and a little Danish since my high school Russian seems to have been flushed completely by the succeeding three or four new languages I've failed to learn, and Andrei translated when necessary. Turns out Tordi left Afghanistan as a refugee in 1997 and is waiting for things to stabilize enough to go back. He is an ethnic Uzbek, from the north of Afghanistan, got his PhD in cosmology in Leningrad, and taught at Kabul University. He speaks Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, and Farsi, and if I understood correctly also Pashtun, Tadjik, and maybe German, and broken English. Quite possibly he's the smartest guy in the room. Still has trouble with the glottal stops, though. I suggested he had trouble with Danish because his head is simply full, and when Andrei laughed and translated Tordi agreed.

Okay, I went to class both times this week and it was fine. If I do more homework on the weekend I won't fall out of student mode and have such bad Mondays. The teacher is really nice, and he's done a much better job this week of keeping things moving. The only real killer is when he spends ten minutes helping a single student with a pronunciation problem. Sometimes I can hear the problems - like the Russians, who don't aspirate their plosives - and sometimes I can't. But most of us have different problems, so if he let us split into pairs, where the partner's job is just to listen and indicate right/wrong/close.

My own bugaboo is that I'm completely incapable of distinguishing between the i pronounced as an [i], such as in spis (same vowel as in speak) and the i pronounced as an [e], such as in sikkert (same vowel as in pick). It sounds easy when it's in English, peek/pick, but in Danish they are even closer, only a difference of a few millimeters gap between tongue and roof of mouth, and they can be short or long and I just can't hear it. On the tests, I get nine out of ten wrong, so the next time I try to hear the same way and switch my answers, and I still get nine of ten wrong.

The thing that makes Danish especially tricky to learn is that fast spoken Danish and carefully spoken Danish are almost two different dialects, and when you ask a Dane to repeat something they do it slowly and carefully, adding in new sounds so that you can hear the difference. Thanks, but no thanks - if you don't repeat the original sound, I'll never learn it.

And while slow spoken Danish in informed by about 75% of the written letters, conversational Danish ignores fully half and skimps on the rest. Example: Jeg er, which means "I am," is pronounced [Jai er] if each word is enunciated - that's the Yi with dipthong from Yikes and then the English word err. But in a sentence, such as Jeg er hjemme nu, I am home now, Jeg er is one syllable: [Ja:], like the English word yaw.

The temperature has been bobbling around zero (C), mostly under, since I got back from vacation. Between that and the throat stress from this language, my three-week old cough is likely to persist until summer. Which is quite lovely hereabouts.

The Danish claim (brag?) that their language is especially difficult for outsiders to master. This may simply be an expression of xenophobia, or of pre-emptively/perversely claiming a weakness as a strength (c.f. deaf culture and unix users). Or it may be true. I had my first Danish class tonight, so I'll certainly keep you posted. Meanwhile, here's a factoid to help you reach a premature conclusion.

Take the sentence "Hvem er det?" If you've studied anything besides English which uses the Latin alphabet, you will already be familiar with the notion that this might not be pronounced "huh-vem errr deht?" And if in addition you have any experience with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you are probably already sympathetic to the notion of replacing the Latin alphabet with IPA. As for me, the first language I studied and forgot was Russian. But Cyrillic is almost perfectly phonetic, and the second language I failed to learn was German, which as a root of English doesn't seem all that quirky. Thus Chinese pinyin (e.g. "cu zuo zai nar?", pronounced just like it's spelled) threw me for loop, but I'm better now, and I can sound out pinyin correctly if they bother to put in tonal markings (even the Chinese usually don't, which makes Pinyin worthless for most uses). So I'm over that now, and I'm ready to tackle Danish, which when you read alound with American English pronunciations puts you about as far from native spoken Danish as would the same exercise with Pinyin.

Back to "hvem er det," character by character. The H is both silent and ineffective, a legacy presumably of the Viking era, which shows up in modern Danish life only when they drive. (The Swedes, we are told, already omit the H, having moved further from their marauder roots and into the furniture business.)

The "v" is as you would expect, a voiced consonant with the upper teeth over the lower lip. The e is a fairly neutral, central e, if I remember correctly, not too far from our friend the schwa.

The e does hold our first real Danish trick, though: Kissinger Speak. If the word "hvem," which means who, is a stressed word, and we determine stress the same way as in English - stressed words are those which are most important to the meaning of the sentence in context, so that when you ask "who are you," you stress "who" if you want to draw attention to the fact that you want identity information that perhaps the other person seems to think you already have, and you stress "you" if you want to direct the question to a new person you suddenly switched focus towards - then you must remember that the Danish language, like the Danish land, is very flat, so that stress is expressed horizontally, in pauses and timing, rather than vertically, with pitch, and so you slow the delivery of the word "hvem," and you then note that the "e" in its stressed form is pronounced loosely and weakly, in the throat, as if Nixon were asking his lieutenant how to deal with the witnesses: "make (h)ve.e.e.e.e.m di.i.isssapea.a.a.r."

The "m" is like a Steven Seagal film: "Silent but Marked." "Marked" is a linguist's word meaning "pronounced deceptively." So the correct way to pronounce "hvem er" (and I will end the suspense of the rest of the sentence by revealing that "er" is simply "er," same schwa, normal arr, and the "t" at the end of "det" is either silent or possibly a very gently, almost inaudible "d") is, put your upper teeth over your lower lip, make a gutteral clicking sound with schwa modulation for as long as you like, and then come to a glottal stop. Then, after you have stopped emitting any air, move your lips to the "m" configuration, pressed together and slightly forward. This is the "marking."

This is like follow-through in a baseball swing. Although you won't actually make an "emmm" sound, your pronunciation of the vowel is in theory altered by the foreknowledge of the consonent to come. And this is supposed to happen even if you know the trick.

You then make the "er" normally, but since you have left your lips in an "emmm" position from the last word (you have left your lips in an "emm" position, haven't you?), it will come out "mer." However, and the fact that the school I am attending teaching this distinction is the cause of the three-month waiting list of whose top I just passed, there is a difference between marking the "m" as followthrough on the first word's vowel versus choosing to start the second word with your lips in an "m" position. It is a difference performed unconsciously by every Dane, learned in childhood and as inexplicable by an untrained Dane as grammar is to an untrained ... to most of us, really. It's a difference that had a student fuming in the hallway, "Seven years I live here. The Danes they do not say this thing. It is 'veh mer de.'" But every Dane can hear this subtle difference. And Danes, having some of the same "face-saving" issues as the Chinese, will if you fail to pronounce your sounds properly to this level subconsiously flag everything you say as suspect and refuse to take any action based upon it, because there exists a minute possibility that you didn't say what you (in context almost certainly) did say, and the risk of losing face by doing the wrong thing in response to spoken Danish is unacceptable, and therefore you must not have spoken Danish.

So for the next three weeks of class we are learning to speak, letter by letter, consciously and deliberately making all of the critical mental gyrations which will eventually because automatic and which will produce Proper Danish. Which sounds like Henry Kissinger gargling.