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Danish · Dansk

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Learn Danish free in your browser — 80 lessons from A1 to B2, with flashcards and pronunciation practice. No subscription, no download.

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DanishLesson 1

hej

hy

hello

Why learn Danish with Langula?

Score your stød from day one

The stød — Danish's phonemic creaky-voice glottal catch — is one of the trickiest sounds any learner faces. Langula's in-browser pronunciation scorer gives you immediate feedback so you start building the habit at A1, not trying to correct it at B2.

Drill en/et until it sticks

Every Danish noun must be learned with its gender because it controls the suffixed definite article and adjective endings. Leitner five-box flashcards review each noun at exactly the right intervals to make 'en bil → bilen' and 'et hus → huset' automatic.

Tackle Denmark's massive vowel system

With 16–20 distinct vowel qualities and the extra letters Æ, Ø and Å, Danish has one of Europe's richest vowel inventories. Structured lessons introduce them in context from your very first session, and pronunciation practice lets you hear the difference and close the gap.

80 lessons, A1 to B2

Lessons follow a clear sequence — greetings and base-20 numbers first, passive voice and nuanced idioms later — so you always know where you stand and what comes next on the road to fluent Danish.

Certificates aligned with Prøve i Dansk

Per-level certificates from A1 to B2 give you a motivating, concrete roadmap aligned with the proficiency thresholds behind Denmark's official Prøve i Dansk exams required for residency and higher study.

Free, open in any browser

Langula is ad-supported and genuinely free — open it on any phone or laptop, start your first Danish lesson without signing up, and add a free account later if you want to sync progress across devices. Audio for pronunciation scoring is never stored.

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How it works

  1. Pick your language

    Danish is preselected — add your source language and go.

  2. Short daily lessons

    5–20 minutes a day: new words plus due reviews.

  3. Pronunciation & progress

    Repeat aloud, watch your streak and unlock badges.

Your first Danish words

After the very first lesson you can greet people and say thank you.

Tap a card to flip it

From A1 to B2 — your structured learning path

Here is how your journey is built: four CEFR levels, 80 lessons. Each lesson teaches 20 new words and 6 example sentences — flashcards and pronunciation practice lock them in before the next level unlocks.

CEFR levels · A1–B2
4
lessons · 20 per level
80
words & sentences per lesson
26
  1. A1

    Danish Foundations· Beginner

    Lessons 1–20

    Master the 29-letter alphabet including Æ, Ø and Å, and begin training your ear to the stød and Danish's distinctive vowels from day one. Learn greetings, the two genders (en/et), suffixed definite articles ('bilen', 'huset'), present-tense verbs with no person agreement, basic V2 word order, and numbers — including the tricky base-20 system that kicks in at 50.

    After this you can

    • greet people and introduce yourself
    • ask about numbers, time and prices
    • order something in a café
    • ask and answer simple questions
  2. A2

    Everyday Danish· Elementary

    Lessons 21–40

    Add past and perfect tenses, common modal verbs, possessives and adjective agreement (-t for neuter, -e for plural and definite forms). Build vocabulary for travel, food, work and daily routines, and continue intensive listening and pronunciation drills to handle reduced endings and swallowed consonants.

    After this you can

    • talk about family, work and hobbies
    • go shopping and ask for directions
    • tell stories in the past
    • make appointments and arrange to meet
  3. B1

    Connected Speech· Intermediate

    Lessons 41–60

    Handle connected narration in past and future, relative clauses, and the shifted word order in subordinate clauses ('fordi jeg ikke kommer'). Express opinions, plans and feelings across most everyday and workplace situations, and refine stød contrasts and vowel distinctions so your spoken Danish is clearly understood.

    After this you can

    • express and justify your opinion
    • travel alone and solve problems
    • report on experiences and plans
    • roughly follow films and podcasts
  4. B2

    Fluent and Professional· Advanced

    Lessons 61–80

    Reach confident, nuanced use across abstract and professional topics: both passive constructions (-s and 'blive'), natural intonation and rhythm, complex written texts and emails. Understand fast native speech, films and podcasts, and approach the level required for Danish residency and study — including the Prøve i Dansk exams.

    After this you can

    • follow long discussions effortlessly
    • express yourself spontaneously and fluently
    • use Danish at work
    • understand complex texts and news

  5. Your goal: fluent in everyday life

    Level B2 complete — including a PDF certificate for every level you reach.

    Start at A1
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Learn Danish — free and at your own pace

Danish is spoken natively by around 5.5–6 million people — primarily in Denmark but also as a co-official language in the Faroe Islands and Greenland, with a recognized minority community in Germany's Schleswig-Holstein region. Denmark leads globally in design, life sciences, wind energy and gaming, and Danish proficiency is a genuine requirement for many local jobs and for permanent residency or citizenship. Yet the most immediate reward is cultural: even halting Danish earns warmth from a nation that, despite near-universal English fluency, deeply values any effort to meet it on its own terms.

Danish is North Germanic, written in a 29-letter Latin alphabet that adds Æ, Ø and Å at the end — but what truly sets it apart is how sharply speech diverges from the page. Consonants soften or disappear entirely, and the vowel inventory runs to 16–20 distinct qualities, one of the largest in Europe. Most striking is the stød: a phonemic creaky-voice glottal catch that separates 'mor' (mother) from 'mord' (murder). The grammar, by contrast, is a genuine relief — two genders, no noun cases beyond the genitive -s, and verbs that never inflect for person or number.

The US Foreign Service Institute places Danish in Category I — among the quickest world languages for English speakers, at roughly 600–750 hours to professional proficiency. That reflects the genuine ease of written Danish: grammar and word order map naturally onto English, and once you can read Danish, Norwegian Bokmål becomes largely transparent at no extra cost. The difficulty sits squarely in the ear and mouth. Swallowed consonants, vowel reduction and the stød make spoken Danish sound quite unlike its spelling, so building pronunciation habits early — rather than treating them as a finishing touch — is the most valuable time you can spend.

Langula's structure maps directly onto what Danish learners actually need. Eighty A1-to-B2 lessons introduce Æ, Ø and Å and the stød in A1 — where they belong — then build the two-gender noun system and suffixed definite articles through Leitner five-box flashcards designed to make 'bilen' and 'huset' instinctive rather than consciously retrieved. The in-browser pronunciation scorer gives honest, immediate feedback on Danish's hardest features — the crowded vowel space and the stød — without a tutor or language partner. It runs in any browser on mobile or desktop, with no install and no sign-up required to begin.

More on Danish

More to discover

Frequently asked questions

Is Danish hard for English speakers to learn?
Reading and grammar are genuinely easy — the US Foreign Service Institute rates Danish Category I, at roughly 600–750 hours to professional proficiency. There are no noun cases and no verb agreement, and the vocabulary has plenty of Germanic overlap with English. The hard part is the spoken language: the stød, heavily swallowed consonants and a very large vowel inventory mean that speech sounds quite unlike the spelling. Langula's pronunciation practice targets exactly that gap.
What is the stød and why does it matter?
The stød is a brief creaky-voice or glottal catch that occurs in the middle or end of certain syllables. It is phonemic — it changes meaning — so 'mor' (mother) and 'mord' (murder) are a minimal pair, as are 'hun' (she) and 'hund' (dog). Getting the stød right is one of the clearest markers of advanced Danish, which is why Langula introduces pronunciation scoring from A1 onward.
What special letters does Danish use?
Danish uses a 29-letter Latin alphabet: the standard 26 plus Æ, Ø and Å, always in that order at the end. Å was introduced in a 1948 spelling reform to replace the older digraph 'aa' — you still see 'aa' in place names like Aalborg and in some surnames. The three extra letters are all vowels, and learning to produce them correctly early on pays dividends across the whole language.
How long does it take to reach conversational Danish (B1)?
With consistent daily study, most learners reach A2–B1 in roughly 6–12 months. Because the grammar is simple, written progress is fast; the limiting factor is almost always understanding rapid spoken Danish. Regular listening exposure combined with pronunciation drilling — like Langula's spaced-repetition flashcards plus in-browser speech scoring — compresses that timeline considerably.
Does learning Danish help with Norwegian or Swedish?
Yes, enormously — especially for reading. Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are extremely close, often 80–90% mutually intelligible on the page, and Swedish is also largely readable once you know Danish. Spoken intelligibility is lower because the three languages sound quite different, but Danish gives you a substantial head start across all of Scandinavia.
Why are Danish numbers above 40 so confusing?
Danish uses a vigesimal (base-20) counting system above 40. 'Halvtreds' (50) literally means 'half-third times twenty', 'tres' (60) is 'three twenties', and 'firs' (80) is 'four twenties'. The pattern is perfectly logical once decoded, but looks completely opaque at first — which makes spaced-repetition flashcards the most efficient way to drill them until they feel automatic.

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