Danish: An Elementary Grammar and Reader

by Elias Bredsdorff

This course has six parts: 1. A general introduction to written and spoken Danish. 2. A chapter on Danish phonetics. 3. A grammar, arranged by sections under nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc., with chapters on word-order and word-formation, and including exercises. 4. A section of general information - about money, weights and measures, meals, etc. 5. Twenty-five Danish texts (twenty prose, five poetry) from standard authors for translation into English. 6. Twenty English texts, graded in difficulty, for translation into Danish. No other Danish grammer and reader with this scope and degree of scholarship exists. Mr Bredsdorff has taught in England for a number of years, and most of his pupils have started with no knowledge of Danish. His course has been tried out and proved successful.

316 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 1974

Reviews

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

They don't make textbooks like this anymore, do they? So pretty and concise and all-you-generally-need and short.

I wouldn't recommend this to beginners; this book would help if accompanied by simple dialogues and more exercises.

For intermediate levels, though, it's just the thing. I finished the Duolingo Danish course (vocabulary intensive with a focus on speaking) right before this and the phonetics/grammar section went to fix any misconceptions I had about word order, adjective declinations, verb forms, conjunctions and the sort. The grammar section was then followed by a short 'common words' (units of measure, for example) section and several short (1-2 pg.) stories in Danish that made for lightly challenging but pleasant reading. Then, the book ended with some twenty-something passages in English, to be translated.

All in all, very neatly done, if I do say so myself.