stordragon wrote:Unfortunately, it looks like Danes use the phrase "at træffe foranstaltninger" much more often than "at tage forholdsregler" So I bet you would resort to dictionaries from time to time if you are reading some academic writings.
Defintiely. But it's still not like learning a completely new language, it's more akin to an American having trouble with British vocabulary.
stordragon wrote:Yes but I believe this only applies to *written* communication but NOT to *oral* communication.
I don't believe a normal non-Scanian Swede without adequate trainings in advance will be so quick-minded as to swiftly figure out what such non-cognate individual words mean by the time a Dane has already finished his speech (not to mention the great gap between pronunciation rules of the two languages: everyone knows the pronunciation gap between Danish and Swedish is by far wider than that between Norwegian and Swedish). I would estimate that if it were not for the fact of you being a Västergötlander from southwestern Sweden on the NO-SE border, it could be even harder for you to understand colloquial Danish without any training.
Spoken Danish is a whole other beast, that is very true. And it doesn't really help that I'm from this part of the country when it comes to Danish. It helps me with Norwegian, sure, but it's things like the accent and being able to use three genders instead of two in Bokmål without being completely lost... in other words the things that they didn't get from (mostly middle and upper class 18th and maybe a little 19th century Copenhagen) Danish.
I can't understand normal colloquial Danish at all when spoken, but I can speak to Danes without resorting to English if we both speak clearly and a bit slower than normal. And I have never claimed otherwise, I just don't think that having to do that and having to ask for clarifications or look up a word or two every once in a while means speaking a completely different language. Especially since you can usually pick up the language/variety/whatever by sheer exposure and doing just that without any formal studying at all.
Keep in mind that a lot of Swedes study in Copenhagen without attending any sort of formal class beforehand, and the vast majority do just fine.