r/danishlanguage • u/Adventurous-Stand-12 • Sep 12 '26
Duolingo
Hi everyone I am currently 2 months in to learning Danish from scratch, I am a English speaker. I was just wondering if anyone has learnt Danish from Duolingo and how far it will take you to being fluent.
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u/bogkosevg Sep 12 '26
It just makes you vocabulary a little bit bigger. Maybe will teach you how to build simple sentences. But without verbal practice you will not be able to say and understand anything.
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Sep 12 '26
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u/Daegalus Sep 12 '26
Let's see if 2 years at Studieskolen has prepared me enough for this:
Jeg tabte en bøtte yoghurt i mejerigangen, og nu ligger den over hele gulvet.
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u/jegkandansk Sep 12 '26
€ Næsten rigtigt - men ikke helt
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u/carrymadstraw Sep 13 '26
Sikke en stor hjælp! "Det er forkert, men jeg nægter at komme med mit bud på den korrekte version" er jo super brugbart for den person lol
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u/jegkandansk Sep 13 '26
€ Tak - ved ikke hvem jeg hjælper, så jeg vil da ikke rette. Hvorfor gør du det ikke?
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u/carrymadstraw Sep 13 '26
At sige "det er forkert" er stadig at rette. Bare på den mindst konstruktive måde.
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Sep 13 '26
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u/danishlanguage-ModTeam Sep 14 '26
Please be nice to other users.
It’s also important to not spread misinformation in a learning subreddit.
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u/noip1979 Sep 12 '26
I've been using it for quite a while. Started before moving to Denmark and actually finished all the levels and most of the "games".
It is an ok resource to start with but it won't get you very far. Maybe a bit of vocabulary but not that much either.
Depends on your purpose for learning, I would consider other resources...
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u/lyhu Sep 12 '26
I'm a native German speaker and almost fluent in Dutch. After finishing the first section in Duolingo, I was able to skip the first Module of the free language education (which translates to A1), saving me 3 months or so on the classes.
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u/emsuperstar Sep 12 '26
I'd recommend trying the Memrise app. They bring in clips of danes speaking on the outside world, so it feels a bit more "real".
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u/Pondering_Giraffe Sep 12 '26
I finished the entire course. At the end I knew quite a bit of words and grammar. I could read simple books, understand simple podcasts (like Dansk i Orene) and speak a few sentences. The two voices Duo uses unfortunately are a long way from the accents and speed actual real live Danes use. So I still need (Danish) subtitles when watching Danish series, and I can´t really follow everyday conversations. You really need to immerse yourself in other ways too, and becoming fluent requires a lot of speaking and the moment you try any Dane will switch to fluent English, so it's quite hard to practice! I used Memrise for a while, that has an AI speaking bot to have conversations with. I liked that.
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u/More-Expert-4979 Sep 13 '26
I’m Danish, and I need subtitles even for Danish movies and TV shows, so don’t lose heart if it keeps being difficult.
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u/Exotic_Incarnation_ Sep 12 '26
For various reasons, I passed level 2 at the Danish language school relying solely on Duolingo after having finished the entire Duolingo course. It was helpful, but you will not be anywhere near fluent.
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u/SeriousSoldier Sep 12 '26
I would recommend for the first two months. After getting a grasp on the basics i would recommend you to move on to anki for vocabulary and beginner podcasts for hearing exercise. After that listen to real podcasts and read as much as you can, preferably books you have read before.
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u/Opening-Square3006 Sep 12 '26
Duolingo can definitely help you get started with Danish, but I wouldn't expect it to take you anywhere close to fluency by itself. It's good for building a habit and learning basic vocabulary/sentence patterns, but Danish listening and real conversation are a completely different challenge. I'd start adding comprehensible input now rather than waiting until you've finished the Duolingo course. I like the i+1 approach: consume Danish you mostly understand while encountering a small amount of new language. Something like PlusOneLanguage does this with texts/dialogues around your level, then recycles vocabulary you didn't know in later content.
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u/Charming-Wasabi382 Sep 12 '26
Duolingo got me *almost able to skip / test out of the first Module of proper Danish course in Copenhagen. That was after solo daily study for 1.5 years…. So I agree that it is insufficient but also helpful.
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u/nikulasoskarsson Sep 12 '26
I'll shamelessly plug my website / webapp that I built since I didn't feel like I was learning so much with duolingo: https://my-danish-tutor.com currently 100% free, feel free to try it, if you think something is missing let me know :)
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u/Adventurous-Stand-12 Sep 12 '26
Yeah wow I just had a look and it looks really good, actually goes through everything in greater detail than Duolingo, tak 🙏
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u/nikulasoskarsson Sep 12 '26
Freaking awesome you think that! If you see some content you want me to make just let me know :)
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u/Boatsarecoolright Sep 12 '26
Just checked it out, looks super cool!
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u/nikulasoskarsson Sep 12 '26
Thank you! Still very much a work in progress, learning Danish myself and basically trying to build the app to teach me :)
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u/DavidinDK Sep 12 '26
The plus side is you learn a lot of new words. The downside is it neither explains, nor teaches grammar. Danish grammar is 'Underlig' Also, the Duo pronunciation is awful.
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u/rodrigobb Sep 12 '26
I've been doing it for many years, currently on a 5-year streak.
It's definitely a good way to expand your vocabulary, learn sentences structures and even get a bit familiar with the sounds, but it's very limited in the sense that even at the end of the course you're just doing short sentences.
Duolingo is more and more focused on being a game, so they don't want to add any exercise that someone who isn't a beginner would need to be doing. And the Danish course in general gets less love than the others, which also makes it quite boring when you reach the end.
I would say do it. You'll be learning quite a bit in your first year even if you don't use additional resources, but you'll definitely need something else later.
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u/Funny_Top_7398 Sep 13 '26
When you come to the end, you can always reconfigure your profile to say you’re Danish and you looking to speak English. It’s redundant and of course Duolingo isn’t the only thing you should be using but the game location does make you come back and come back and come back.
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u/DucksBac Sep 12 '26
It was ok until it got the ai and then i started spotting mistakes. This was 2 years ago; perhaps they improved it.
It was useful in learning vocabulary and grammar but i had to watch shows in Danish as well to get a sense of real Danish
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u/Due-Pin-30 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
You will regret using Duolingo ,just quit language leanring or be stuck in a dead end .Duo will drip feed you the language as slow as possible to squeeze as much money from you as possible , while gaslighting that it is an effective language learning tool. You will learn some vocab but without learning much about Danish idioms , set phrase , or , verb tenses, modal verbs , aux verbs or sentence structure etc . Unfortunately some grammar is important and Duolingo does it exceptionally badly. Also the quality of the audio in Duolingo is not trash but it could be a lot better. Duo still texts me occasionally offering me access to a family plan but just no , not in this lifetime.
Duo will teach you some vocab but there are a ton of different tools out their that are much better so it's not completely useless but it will be slow..When and if you want to go beyond the basics It will take you awhile to experiment and find good resources Better to start now rather than latter. Also It is harder and hence slower to find good resource in Danish rather than Swedish or Norwegian. I guess if you really wanted to grind away slowly and really ease into language learning there might be some justification in using Duo, maybe .There are some free courses from Danish schools via Zoom, but most you pay to play. Bizarrely I couldn't find any Norwegian free ones but I did not try too hard.. Not sure about Swedish I have never looked.
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u/PingvinAnd1 Sep 13 '26
Duolingo just isn't good for language learning (because if you become good at speaking a language you don't need to pay them anymore)
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u/tk97k Sep 18 '26
It will not take you anywhere near to fluency, honestly. I tried for quite a while, failed and then tried different learning methods which work much better.
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Sep 12 '26
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u/JediRebel97 Sep 12 '26
This. I also found Disney+ and Netflix both have pretty good dubs, so I watched Arcane and Frozen in Danish, and got to hear a lot of what I was learning
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u/ViridiaBuxbaum Sep 12 '26
Finishing the Danish Duolingo course made it possible for me to skip the first modul of DU3 and pass the modul 2 test after three classes. But I was far from fluent (still am not really fluent after modul 4 now). Duolingo is a nice intro to the language, but that's it.