I'm Just Dansking in the Dark

A few things before I get started:
First, bonus points for anyone who gets my lame joke with the title of this post. Super bonus points for anyone who laughed.
Second, apologies for not updating more frequently. I've fallen into quite a routine here, and I'm not going to waste everyone's time by regaling you with stories about what I had for dinner or how much laundry I did this week.
Third, there won't be many pictures in this post. Bear with me.

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So, a few weeks ago I began classes to aid me in my quest to learn Danish. By all indications, this is going to be an extremely fruitless quest.  I was aware before starting this that Danish is a hard language to learn, particularly the pronunciations, but i had no idea just how hard it would be.
Some fun facts about Danish:

• According to our instructor Mogens (pronounced 'Moans'), there are nine Danish vowels. There are more than 30 ways to pronounce them.
• There are two words for 'one'. 'en' and 'et'. There are no set rules for when you use one rather than the other.
• In fact, it seems there are very few actual rules involved in Danish. Conjugation is almost nonexistent. Obviously there are tenses, but that's all.
• There is no rhyme or reason whatsoever to pronunciation, other than that when 'kk' appears in a word, it always makes a hard 'g' sound.

How I feel in class every week.

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Word of the Day:

 

Actually I'll give you a few phrases to make up for the non-excitingness of the rest of this post.

 

Slappe af: Relax, chill out. Pronounced 'slappuh ay'. 'Ay' here being the best approximation of the way you'd say the letter A when saying the alphabet.´

 

Tillyke med fødselsdagen: Happy Birthday. Pronounced 'tilluga (rhyming with 'beluga') mell fooselsdayen'. The 'oo' is like the 'oo' in 'book' but with really rounded lips.

 

Explaining how to pronounce Danish is impossible.