Free Danish vocabulary trainer
Learn the Danish words you'll actually hear
Danish has a long tail of words you may never meet. This teaches you the short head first β in the order the language actually uses them, one small group at a time. When you want whole sentences instead of a list, 48 everyday topics are there to read and hear, A1βB2.
FreeΒ·No accountΒ·Works offline β your progress stays in your browser.
How the word list works
Three rules, and that's the whole method
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Words arrive in frequency order
You start at rank 1 and work down. Nothing is chosen because it fits a theme β the order comes from how often Danish actually uses each word.
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You study in small groups
Roughly twenty words at a time, so a session is finishable rather than endless.
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You practise on sentences you can already read
Every example sentence is built only from words at or below your current group. No sentence quietly leans on a word you have not met yet.
The other half
Texts by level, read out loud
The word list gets you words. Dansk efter niveau gets you sentences: 48 everyday topics across 4 levels, A1βB2, each one a set of questions with an answer written the way someone would actually answer it.
Hear it while you read it
Every question and every answer is recorded, and the word being spoken lights up as it is said. Danish only, or alternating with the English a sentence at a time β at full speed, or slowed to 0.75Γ or half.
Words to extend the answer
Each question carries the words its answer uses and more of the same kind, so the point is not to recite the model answer but to build your own out of them. 5,696 words across the topics.
Test the topic's words
Flashcards over every word a topic lists, either direction, with whatever you miss coming round again. Nothing to set up β it is the same page.
The levels page is written in Danish, since reading it is part of the exercise. Open it at A1.
What's in it
2,000 entries, and the receipts for each one
Each entry carries its inflected forms, an English gloss, and β where a dictionary documents it β IPA for every form, not just the headword. Here is how to read it, with the sounds playable.
Why frequency first
The payoff is front-loaded
Word frequency is savagely uneven. A small number of words do most of the work in any language, and the payoff per word you learn drops sharply as you go down the list. Learning in frequency order front-loads that payoff.
The honest version of this argument β including the figure that is published for Danish, and the one that isn't β is on why frequency order works.
Where the list comes from
7 sources, cross-checked
7 independent frequency lists, checked against each other rather than trusted individually. One turned out to be a copy of another. Two had no usable frequency signal at all β one of them was ordered by the length of the English translation.
Those are still in the pile, but they no longer get a vote on the ordering. See what was kept and what was thrown out.
On the way
Next: say it, and see every word marked
Reading and hearing Danish is half of it. The other half is being understood when you open your mouth β and that is the one thing a word list cannot tell you about. So the next big release listens: you read a Danish sentence aloud, and every word comes back marked.
Jeg kan godt lide at gΓ₯ en tur
I like going for a walk.
- godt β weakest sound: t
- lide β weakest sound: Γ°
- tur β weakest sound: r
Word by word, not one number
A single score out of ten tells you nothing you can act on. Every word gets its own verdict β clear, nearly there, or not understood β so you know which two words to say again.
It names the sound
Not just that word was weak, but which sound in it: the soft d in lide, the stΓΈd on gΓ₯. That comes from the same sourced IPA the word list already carries.
Nothing decided on one try
Machine pronunciation scores are noisy β they agree with human raters about as often as a coin agrees with a careful listener. So a word is never marked down until two attempts in a row say so.
Not in this release β it needs a server that can hold a speech key, which the rest of this site deliberately does not. It will be a paid feature when it lands. You can watch the whole flow run on a saved recording now: open a topic in Dansk efter niveau and press Γv udtale.
Start where the language starts
The first fifty words are waiting β no sign-up, nothing to install, and it works offline once the page has loaded. Or start with a text and let it read to you.