My journey as a secondary science teacher candidate at UVIC

Week 2: Inquiry project beginnings

Kvinden og drengen spiser brødet.

(The girl and the boy are eating the bread.)

Well that is pretty much the extent of danish for me right now! Okay, well to be fair to myself, I do know a bit more than that but my ability to say anything of great use in society remains limited! Alas, we all start somewhere!

Full disclosure, this is my second real attempt at learning danish. In 2018, I travelled to Denmark with my mom for the first time to celebrate my cousin’s wedding! It was an amazing trip and I fell in love with the country! In preparation for the trip I thought I would try to learn some danish and downloaded the Duolingo app. I grasped some basics, but ultimately much of the language I picked up was while I was in Denmark. My mom is fluent in the language and was an excellent guide as I navigated the streets and bakeries in Copenhagen.  I came back having soaked up more of the language but without much holding me accountable eventually my duolingo habit was no more.

I am not sure as of yet what other resources might be out there to learn danish and I intend on exploring those further through this inquiry but for now I have downloaded my duolingo app again, and I have gone through the Basics 1 lessons. With so many new things to navigate these days it was nice to touch base with something familiar to restart my danish language journey on. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Duolingo it is a free language learning app that you can download and whatever device you choose.

As you can see on my app, I have a bunch of lesson categories which I can click on to further explore and learn. For some of the later lessons I will need to complete previous categories to unlock them. As for now I have reviewed ‘Basics 1’ and I look forward to tackling ‘Basics 2’ this week and maybe even a few more categories!

My Current lesson progress, and future lessons

Danish to English

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A pronunciation test

Auditory translation test

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The app is incredibly easy to use and provides you many different modes of learning. For example in some questions you translate danish to english, in others you translate english to danish and in some questions you have to practice your pronunciation. Overall, it really does give you a lot of different avenues to practice your skills.  Another great feature of the app is the daily goals and reminders you can set for yourself to remind yourself to spend a bit of time learning your language. You can also add friends who are also using duolingo and see their progress learning their language too! If you want to get competitive you can even challenge each other to spend more time or earn more experience points!

As someone who was in late french immersion, I have only ever learnt a language in a true full immersion experience so I will admit that I am a bit skeptical of truly being able to learn a language this way. For this reason I will certainly be exploring other resources that might help to facilitate long term learning, and once I get my feet on the ground I would love to be able to practice conversing with my mom! After all, she is a big reason I am on this journey in the first place! I look forward to further exploring this world and I am grateful to have both this blog and my Trello board to help me organize my progress and thoughts as I go along!

Until next time! Farvel!

4 Comments

  1. aaronmauger

    Sometimes the nonsense phrases are the most fun to learn and use though. Not that your opening was nonsense, but it is not a commonly used sentence, so its fun. I’m excited to see what other great phrases you come up with!

    • elsabetlapointe

      Yes, I certainly do get a good laugh out of some the phrases I am translating! Looking forward to learning how to ask from some of my own bread though!

  2. allisonseidel

    I love that you chose the two main wandering locations as streets and “bakeries”! I have tried in the past to become conversationally fluent in French, and I learned that I am definitely motivated by food. I strongly believe that the ability to competently order food in the language of the country you are visiting is the most important skill!

    • elsabetlapointe

      I am a firm believer in using the ability to obtain delicious treats as motivation for acquiring a new language skill, particularly when they are as good as the cakes and pastries in Denmark!

Leave a Reply

© 2024 My Education Corner

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑