alt Hacker NewsI once had some Norwegian room mates in Ireland, and whenever we collectively couldn't find the proper English word, we usually got lucky with our native tongues. When listening to Scandi TV series, I'm still surprised more than I should be by the occasional match (recently: suddenly -> "plutselig", similar to German "plötzlich").
Now, as for the Danish room mate, he might as well have been speaking Greek.
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I studied in Trondheim for a semester and learned some Norwegian. Whenever I didn't know a word, I just pronounced the Dutch or English word in a 'Norwegian way'. Most of the time people didn't even blink. So much so that I'd then ask them if the word I just used existed and invariably the answer was that that was the correct word.
However if you asked your Danish roommate to write down what he said it would make perfect sense.
In Norway, Danish is sometimes subjected to friendly ridicule as sounding like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth...
Danish is if anything ever so slightly closer to German in vocabulary and grammar, but the pronunciation is another matter.
The effect is bigger in writing. In high school I worked my way through Faust in German by finding an old Danish translation as a parallel text - the old Danish version was a decent halfway point when I struggled too much with the German, and helped me find similarities I wouldn't otherwise.