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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

> Last Thursday in your GSBA-542 classes, Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better.

This was apparently written by a university dean, in a Western country, in 2020. Not during the Dark Ages or the Inquisition, in 2020.

Assuming it's true, if that does not make people pause and doubt human progress, I don't know what will.

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"I am deeply saddened by this disturbing episode that has caused such anguish and trauma."

We should be considering the implications of this claim, if it were true. There's a generation of young adults in this country that have been brought up so emotionally weak that they can be traumatized by a white person uttering sounds that resemble the n-word.

In other words, we have given white people unimaginable powers over the psyche of young minority Americans, because of an upbringing that shielded them from racially insensitive content.

In this case, perhaps the best remedy would be exposure therapy with Russell Peters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk

And suddenly the president's call to defund universities for "radical left indoctrination" sounds a tiny bit less crazy.

It was never crazy, just a wildly disproportionate knee-jerk reaction that ignores the real underlying issues, cultural and legal.

Apart from the impact to the professor and his students who have been denied a learning opportunity, this is the larger cultural problem - validating the simplistic "other side". Both teams are rallying around straw men for each other to attack, driving polarization over essentially nonsense. Meanwhile anyone arguing for sanity gets labeled as an other for not toting the unreasonable party line. Despite claiming to be opposed to one another, Cancellers and Trumpists are just two faces of the same destructive force.

Students of Swedish or Danish at this university will (presumably) be ignorant of the word "slut" (end, finished), and maybe the number six ("sex" / "seks") too.

"We will start the Danish course with the numbers. En, to, tre, fire, fem, fem plus en, syv, otte, ni, ti."

I'm currently studying Danish and can't help but be amused when every 'lyt og gentag' exercise ends with 'slut'. But just as in the OP, it's not even the same vowel as the English word, so the resemblance is only passing. How absurd that careers may be ruined by using the wrong two consonants next to each other. How absurd that we call it progress.

Have you come across a "fartkontrol" yet? Or taken a lift with a light that says "i fart"?

Sadly not - I am studying from England and have not spent too much time in Denmark yet. I look forward to these delights :-)

Hey, how do you study Danish in England? Need it for my kid.

The exercises I am doing are using spaced repetition tools for vocabulary and listening, using textbooks for fine-tuning grammar and pronunciation, and as a writing exercise that's more fun than translating fourteen-thousand different variations on 'the red cat ate a quick mouse', I have just begun attempting to translate the classic children's novel Moonfleet into Danish.

Some good resources:

Spaced Repetition

* Duolingo

* Anki - there are Danish decks readily available online

Textbooks

* Danish: An Essential Grammar (excellent, but too dense for younger kids)

* På vej til dansk (listening exercises, accessible to all)

Websites

* ordnet.dk: excellent online Danish dictionary - I find the phonetic transcriptions invaluable - while they may be inaccessible to younger children anyone can benefit from the plentiful audio snippets. I use this [1] greasemonkey script to help easily download the audio clips when they are particularly helpful, for example as exemplars of particular vowels.

* Wiktionary: A reasonable source of translations for Danish. A good accompaniment to Den Danske Ordbog. The IPA transcriptions don't tend to be quite as good as the ordbog though and there are some surprising gaps.

* Google Translate: Useful as a starting point, although I don't treat it as authoritative.

Misc

* Radio - DR P6 Beat - I'm only able to understand the odd word but I still find this useful for getting to grips with the sound of spoken Danish. Also they play pretty good music (although in case anyone from P6 Beat is reading, the correct number of times to play 'Brimful of Asha (Fatboy Slim Remix)' in a day is not 3).

* Reddit - /r/Denmark - I use this as an accessible font of colloquial Danish.

* Twitter - I follow Danish journalists for the sports I enjoy (Grand Prix racing and road cycling) to get repeated exposure to small fragments of Danish through the day.

Hope this helps :-)

[1] https://pastebin.com/raw/LygwA6bN

Good luck! This is more effort than most European immigrants put in.

You will probably need a native speaker to help your pronunciation, especially for the 42 vowels, and the soft D, and stød.

For my first year studying Danish in Denmark, I could only speak "foreigner Danish" -- the bad accent that, somehow, other foreigners seem to understand (perhaps because we have a limited vocabulary) but which causes Danes to look confused, and repeat what they said in English.

Thanks for the encouragement. I think my soft d is pretty good but I'm definitely a beginner with regards to the vowels and the stød. It's all part of the challenge, though :-)

Awesome list, looks like you're making a real effort. Tough language to learn, mainly because the range of correctness seems quite narrow. English by constrast seems to have a huge range.

Check out this guy, he's making good progress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwS4d_p90o

I think it corresponds to the number of non-native speakers. English speakers are used to hearing people from every corner of the globe speak our language, so we are pretty unfazed by an accent. Danes - like, I think, most speakers of languages that remain largely isolated to their land of origin, have no such exposure - and thus tolerance - to accented speech.

In my experience, most professional immigrants to Denmark have more trouble learning Danish than they would if they'd moved to Sweden or Norway instead.

Before I moved to Denmark, an hour with a Swede plus reading the back of Lonely Planet taught me enough Swedish reading and pronunciation to order food in the airport in Swedish. Danish takes weeks or months of exposure to get an ear for the language, plus more weeks/months of practise to be understood.

It's certainly possible; I know adults from all over Europe whose can speak Danish from reasonably to very well. It does take more effort and more motivation than elsewhere.

(I wrote professional, since this is based on a typical situation of a couple of hours of Danish class a week, plus homework. I can't compare children, other workers, refugees etc, as their situation is so different.)

That's interesting to hear. I must admit I am at least a little bit attracted to the challenge of learning a language that's known for being difficult, though of course the vast majority of what attracts me towards Denmark (over other Nordic and European nations) is lifestyle and political factors.

When I visited Germany, I giggled every time I saw the road sign that looked like it said: “Ass fart”

In Swedish, the last station of e.g. a subway line (the terminus) is a "slutstation". (slut=end, station=station)

It should be the same word in Danish, too.

I've seen native English speakers giggle at that word, for obvious reasons -- when this word pops up all of a sudden while in a mass transit, and one interprets it as an English word, the association is truly bizarre.

But of course the word obviously does not mean some kind of a prostitute central, just like "nà ge" is not part of rap music lyrics.

It's "endestation" in Danish, unfortunately.

The town of Middelfart is reasonable compensation.

What I wonder about, and this has been in the news briefly, is the transformation of mening of the Danish word "neger". Somehow people are starting to think it has the same sting as term referred to in the article does in the US, when actually it's purely an archaic term for someone of African origin. People are getting upset about it and giving it a meaning from another context.

I too am just embarrassed for everyone when I read these apologies, somebody go talk to the accreditation boards for that university and get it re-evaluated.

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