Hello everyone, this post is a sort of companion piece to my recent podcast where I spoke about teaching Danish to Japanese people. It will all make sense in the end (sort of). Let’s start at the beginning, which is probably best.
Over twenty-five years ago, I started a temp job in the London branch of a Danish bank and was later appointed to the permanent staff as an assistant manager in the Trade Finance department. This dealt mainly with customers who wanted to export or import goods and needed to present correct documentation to receive payment or to accept documentation in order to get possession of the goods. The bank acted as a trusted intermediary. For any of you who know about such things, the work included mostly discounting bills of exchange, inward and outward bills for collection and documentary letters of credit. I spent over twenty years in this environment, assisting people whose first language was not English. One thing led to another and eventually I became an English teacher to non-native speakers.
In the Danish bank were of course a lot of Danish nationals and speakers and I could hear Danish being spoken around me all the time. I decided I’d like to know what was being said, so secretly started learning Danish from a couple of books. One was called ‘Teach Yourself Danish’ (by Bente Elsworth) and the other was ‘Colloquial Danish’ (by W. Glyn Jones and Kirsten Gade). They had accompanying cassette tapes, so I could listen to the dialogues on the train, bus or while walking to work. I hadn’t really studied for a while since my banking exams, but was finding learning a completely new and different language very interesting. I studiously spent about an hour a day on the language. This was also about the same time as Danish film makers such as Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and others had introduced the Dogme method of filmmaking. Unknown to me, I would meet the Dogme method again later in my teaching. But that story is for another day. I started watching the Dogme films to get a feel for the language. I also started trying to read some basic Danish literature (what ESOL teachers might class as ‘readers’). Also, I started reading emails and letters on people’s desk. They had no idea I understood some Danish, so didn’t conceal anything. One of my friends did discover my ‘secret’ ability. She sat on the desk behind me with two other Danes and they were telling a joke (in Danish). I thought it was quite funny, so I laughed. My friend quickly caught on and said, ‘You must understand some Danish if you think that was funny’. I owned up and they were all pleased I’d taken an interest in the language. I thought it was time to progress further in the language.
I carried out some research to find out where I could actually take Danish classes and discovered there were such classes at the University of Westminster, a short tube train journey from where I worked. I asked my manager if I took Danish lessons, would the bank pay for them? The answer was yes, although I think if the answer was no I had such an interest in the language and culture, I would have still taken the lessons. I had to go to an assessment first as the classes were divided into levels 1-6. Level 1 was beginners with level 6 being almost proficiency or native speaker level. I told the director of courses that I thought I was probably ready for level 2 as I had self-taught myself the basics of level 1. She said that was fine and if I found level 2 difficult, I could always switch to level 1. Luckily, that was not necessary. I progressed from level 2 to level 3. Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough students for level 4, so I could either take level 3 again or jump to level 5. So, of course I decided on level 5 and eventually completed and passed level 6.
In level 2 I had a really nice friendly teacher. For levels 3,5 and 6 I had a different teacher. Her reputation seemingly proceeded her that she was strict and rude. Luckily, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. She was very kind, a good teacher and offered encouragement to all her students. For part of the end-of-term tests in levels 3,5 and 6, we had to give presentations on a self-chosen topic, but the presentation had to be given in Danish. You’d think it would be stressful enough to give a presentation, but giving it in a second language might only increase the stress. However, the fact it was in another language didn’t really affect me. I suppose this was because I was being my Danish alter ego. I gave three presentations. One on Ragnarok (before all the Marvel films) as I had always been interested in Norse mythology from an early age, another on Hans Christian Andersen and my last presentation was on the Danish film maker, Carl Theodor Dreyer.
In my next post, I’ll discuss how I applied my language learning to my language teaching.
