Wednesday 22 April 2009

Anyone else terrified of Danish numbers?




After Fuzzy's Danish language clip, I found this. It's a Norwegian comic called Fleksnes.

YouTube gives a translation. The Dane speaking over the radio is saying, Mayday, mayday, mayday, can anybody help me, I am in trouble in high seas. Fleksnes says, Hello, this is Oslo, Oslo calling. The Dane on the radio says, Hello Oslo, finally someone is responding to my distress call, here is my position - and then he gives his coordinates.

Danish numbers terrify me actually. On a good day I giggle, but last month I went to pieces in a class presentation because I had naively put in all these dates, which I just couldn't say. In retrospect it was hilarious.
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3 comments:

  1. Fuzzy22 April 2009 at 21:28

    They just make no sense, like so much here! The way they tell time is even weirder to me.

    Here's an excellent post about their wacky numbers by a Danish man who actually gets it! http://blogs.denmark.dk/peterandreas/2009/04/19/numbers/

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  2. Anonymous23 April 2009 at 06:52

    Danish numbers are not so bad. They remind me of French systems. I think French is even weirder because they call 80 as 20 times 4 or something, so when you say 82 it should be 20 times 4 plus 2.

    You just need to think in reverse when trying to figure out Danish number. En og tredive means 31, and so on. It just takes time to get used to it

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  3. PiNG aka Patti25 April 2009 at 20:39

    I always laugh when we have to listen and write the numbers in class - because I always have to write the second number first, which is a little wacky. And the way they read the phone numbers in sets of 2 numbers rather than just giving the 8 numbers in a row makes me crazy!

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