The (Ups) and Downs of Danish Lessons

Yesterday’s Danish lesson was a hell on earth. That’s when it ocurred to me that I haven’t even mentioned attending Danish lessons in the previous articles bus it’s a quite important part of being here. Probably the most important one in order to survive. We started the Danish lessons on 5^th October. Before that date, were all supposed to get an email with “details” about the first lesson like the address or time from the Kommune (municipality). Well the percentage of the “chosen ones” who got the email was like 20%, not good. But we shared the information and came to the first lesson. We all gathered in a canteen in the Sprogcenter (about 60 people maybe). Eventually they made one class with like 20 people (I was the lucky one to get in) and sent the rest home, because they were just clueless about what to do. Okay. Those people were all supposed to get a text about their next lesson, which never happened I believe so some of them started the lessons even 2 weeks later. That was a bit annoying for those of us who already knew the basics and had to repeat them all over again. But then again, it wasn’t the people’s fault.

The so called Intro Course took 1 month and I must say that we learned quite a lot. Even though I took some of the online courses like Duolingo back in Czech I have learned a lot of new stuff and I had really fun. The lessons were really effective, with big emphasis on practising talking rather than writing. Our teacher was a bit old-fashioned meaning if you used your phone during the class she would the most happy to give you detention (not possible for her disappointment). Anyway, after the 1 month intro course you get a choice if you want to continue to a Modul 2 or 3. Nr. 2 is for people who want to go slower with the overall education. Nr. 3 is for people who want to learn as fast as possible. It makes sense I chose nr. 3 because…what would I be waiting for? The teacher warned us it might be a bit too hard to catch on but I like language-learning challenges.

Now I go back to the hell on earth. That’s the perfect way to describe the first lesson of Modul 3. The process was about 100000x slower than in the intro course. I believe our new teacher must have been a turtle in his previous life. It took us 2 hours to do 4 exercises! We listened to every one of them 3 times, completely unnecessarily. In the intro course I spoke in like every 5 minutes, here once in 30 minutes (with the same amount of participants). On top of that, while we were reading some texts, he didn’t even correct the people who said it wrong. And I know it was wrong because I'm a grammar Nazi. Tomorrow we have the second lesson so if it won’t get any better, I’ll probably complain in the Sprogcenter and go back to Duolingo.

BUT! What am I just adding now (12 hours after publishing) is that the Danish lessons are COMPLETELY FREE! Which is a great great thing since otherwise we really wouldn't be able to pay for it. So thanks for this Kommune! And sorry for not mentioning this sooner.

It's just such an irony when everyone's stressing the fact that you need to learn Danish in order to find a job. Well, I would very much like to but I guess it's just not written in the stars for me (us). I've even considered if it's some kind of evil strategy how to make internationals not get a job in Denmark. But I think it's just our bad luck.

We had to drink some alcohol after we got home to put the experience into blur for a while. Still no luck in finding a job and now I won’t even enjoy learning Danish anymore? What am being punished for? So please God I'm praying, make it better.