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.

FreeΒ·No accountΒ·Works offline β€” your progress stays in your browser.

How it works

Three rules, and that's the whole method

  1. 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.

  2. You study in small groups

    Roughly twenty words at a time, so a session is finishable rather than endless.

  3. 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.

What's in it

2,000 entries, and the receipts for each one

2,000 ranked entries
1,610 confirmed by 2+ independent sources
1,229 with sourced pronunciation
1,639 ready to study today

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.

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.

Start learning now