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Danish language

Danish language

snurre
0 HN recommenders · discussed 2016–2026
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About this video

A sketch from the Norwegian NRK show Uti Var Hage poking fun at the Danish language and how hard it is to understand.

Why it appears in the archive

HN posts it as a joke in threads about Denmark, Danes or languages that are hard to understand.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

eivarv · 2016-09 · joke

Hah! I got the gist of it, dear svenskejævel, but I mistook your sarcasm for bona fide paranoia ;) As for intra-Scandinavian relations: I think we can all agree that the Danes are the worst of us - and their language is just ridiculous [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]

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emj · 2018-01 · joke

> You need or look at all related risks You are right that traffic pollution is very bad for the lungs, it's actually the cause of 30%-60% of all deaths related to lung diseases, but this is true for everyone not just cyclists. It's the same number of deaths as for sucides but with an inverse demographics graph of course, at least in Sweden. Those numbers are staggering and the solution to that is not to stop bicyclists navigating normal commute traffic. I would like to say that I do look at the combined risks: There are atleast two longitudinal studies on Dutch and Danish bicyclists that show that using bicycling as an active mode of transport means longer life, basically it's an integration test were you get X% increase in a population by just commuting daily. Here is some commedy that is obvisouly just Norwegians and Swedes being jealous, but it gives you some view on how we think of Danes, and what might affect their lives a bit more than bicycling, as with your link they are very interesting but irrelevant since they do not affect the same population groups. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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mnbvkhgvmj · 2019-08 · joke

True but if a Danish person was to read this to you you would not even recognize the individual words... [VIDEO] EDIT: Just FYI this is a clip from a Norwegian comedy program. Danish and Norwegian have very similar written languages but sound very different when spoken. In reality with some practice Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can speak together and understand one another.

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bryanrasmussen · 2019-11 · joke

Surely people care, but people are able to understand you or will try their darndest. This ability to understand is completely missing from Danish, for example, because (I believe) of the many different vowel sounds and other pronunciation quirks - the result is if you do not speak Danish well most Danes will shut down trying to understand you. Thank God for English in that circumstance. Indeed my teacher used to joke that the most common phrase in Danish is "Hvad siger du" (what are you saying) because it is so difficult for Danes to even correctly understand each other - a funny Norwegian video on this [VIDEO]

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theshrike79 · 2024-07 · joke

Danes and legibility isn't something people say often, even Danes themselves can't always understand other Danes: [VIDEO]

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dcrazy · 2025-07 · joke

> The way I see it, whenever a foreigner is around, they speak “Danish” and once at home they go back to speaking a real language … probably close to Norwegian. Ironic, given there are two official standards for written Norwegian, and no universally agreed-upon way to pronounce the more popular one (Bokmål). > When you are walking in the streets of Copenhagen, and you hear around you the beautiful language full of soft Ds, stød, uvular R and voiceless plosives, sounding like a rotten potato in the throat of a weary donkey ; Know that they don’t understand each other either. > They are basically saying blah blah blah to each other, moving their heads and gesturing, acting as if they could be understood by another sentient being. Even the Danish state broadcaster agrees: [VIDEO]

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encom · 2025-12 · joke

I've tried speaking danish to ChatGPT and asking it very simple questions. I even tried using complete words and pronouncing them properly (inb4 kamelåså)[1], but it didn't help. I didn't manage to have it transcribe a single sentence properly. [1] [VIDEO]

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encom · 2026-05 · joke

>non english languages (god forbid bilingualism) In my experience, any combination of computers + speech + danish has, so far without exception been terrible. Last time I tested ChatGPT, it couldn't understand me at all. I spoke both in my local dialect and as close to Rigsdansk [π] as I could manage. Unusable performance, and in any case I should be able to talk normally, or there's no point. It was about a year ago - it may have improved but I doubt it. I'm completely done trying to talk to machines. Pre-emptive kamelåså: [VIDEO] [π] [LINK]

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