🇩🇰 The best websites for learning Danish

Anders Basby, a Danish teacher at a language school in Copenhagen, has put his exercise bank online for free: adjectives, word order, prepositions, modal verbs, pronouns and more, each with a short English explanation and immediate feedback. It is the fastest way to actually practise the rules other resources only describe. The site is plain HTML on an unencrypted host and looks like it was built in 2008, which it more or less was — the content is what matters.

A full self-study course built with support from the Danish integration ministry, organised into modules of texts and dialogues, grammar explanations with dozens of interactive exercises, and 'lyt og forstå' listening tasks. It costs nothing, needs no account, and covers exactly the ground the state language schools cover in their first modules. The design is dated and there is no speaking practice, so treat it as your grammar-and-reading backbone rather than your whole plan.

DR's easy-language news desk publishes the same stories as the main bulletins in short, simply-worded articles that can be read aloud on the page, so you can read and listen to the same text. It is updated constantly and it is the single best free source of Danish that is real but not yet overwhelming. Written for Danes who find news hard rather than for foreigners, so cultural context is assumed rather than explained.

lex.dk hosts Den Store Danske and a dozen other Danish reference works as a free, ad-free encyclopedia written in careful standard prose. It is excellent reading practice precisely because the register is neutral and the topics are ones you already understand in your own language. Purely reading input — no audio, no exercises, no learner scaffolding.

Run jointly by the Danish Language Council and the Society for Danish Language and Literature, sproget.dk collects usage articles, spelling rules and thousands of answered questions about Danish, plus links to the official reference works. When you need a defensible answer about commas, compound words or ligge/lægge, this is where it lives. Everything is in Danish and aimed at native speakers, so it is only usable from roughly B1 up.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.