It can be frustrating when people don’t understand a word you’re saying.

Our children recently got a lesson in exactly that when we took them on a month-long visit to Denmark.

The Danes speak perfect English – in fact, more grammatically correct than most English-speaking people do – but when children communicate in their native tongue and in haste they can be harder to decipher.

Our five-year-old wanted to know when everyone in Copenhagen would just start speaking English, already.

“Seriously! It’s just Danish, Danish, Danish in Denmark!” she said.

She was feeling the pinch of being in the minority, which is a great lesson in life for all of us. I am thrilled she got to experience this short-lived isolation in a way. No amount of YouTube would have given her the same exposure.

Almost three decades ago aged 17, I learnt Danish in about three months of living with a Danish family. At four months I dreamt in Danish. However, there was a lot of trial and many errors over those weeks. I had repeat trips to the grocery store when my first host mother had sent me on my bike to buy minced beef for pasta and I returned triumphantly with spaghetti.

She had also told me, emphatically: “My husband is a very good cock.”

Too much information, I had thought, until I realised the Danish word for chef was “kok”.

Each night at the dinner table she would quiz me on the Danish translations for knives, forks, plates and all of the ingredients in our Michelin star meals expertly prepared by her cheffy husband. Sometimes she would ask me for the English word for something in the meal.

“Salmon,” I’d say.

“Salmon roe,” I’d continue, “Smoked salmon, salmon mousse, salmon gravlax.” You get the idea; they lived on a fjord.

Then one night she asked me for the English term for a vegetable I could not make out for the life of me. It looked a lot like a spring bulb out of the garden back home in the Riverina.

“It’s a bulb,” I said at last, figuring it was beyond me to actually explain that I had no real idea. 

I hoped my former host mother had no reason to quote me on some of my English translations any time soon. A Danish “porre” was, in fact, a leek. 

Soon after I moved to a new host family who spoke even less English, but I felt well equipped with my growing Danish vocabulary particularly in foodstuffs. Danish new potatoes, summer strawberries and peas rate almost as highly as the rain in daily conversation in Scandinavia. (Our girls agreed the Danish strawberries were out of this world. The rain impressed less!)

Fourteen years ago my husband and I went to a barbecue with the latter family featuring some foods we couldn’t immediately identify or translate. Turns out we ate smoked eel and pigeon, which tasted like, well, chicken!

Then almost 30 years later last month, my family and I returned to my original host mother’s home on the fjord to eat lunch.

I couldn’t believe my luck when she asked me to translate to English the dish she had made. It was a tomato and leek tart.

Finally, I’d been able to set the record straight. 

​* Stewed berry pudding with cream. English-speaking people are always asked to pronounce it because it’s almost impossible for us to do so!