Swedish Or Danish

I live in south-central sweden and I don't understand danish at all. I can read it to some extent, but I don't understand it in speach. I think most danes understand swedish better than we understand danish.

Some say that speaking danish is like speaking swedish with your mouth full of porridge. ;) And I guess norwegian is like speaking swedish on extacy. :p It's faster and always sound happy like if you are warbling forth the words.

I'm from Denmark.
I understand Swedish, but only if you speak very slow.
But after a while talking to you (for example) it would be much easier.
I was in Malmö last year with my school, and this Swedish man told us about your school system and I understood everything he said after 5 minutes.
Ooo, I'm so proud.

Has the fact that you're completely psycho managed to escape your attention?

Well if you look it up in a dictionary it says (translated from Swedish to English by me): Scandinavia, its partly a common name on the countries Sweden, Norway and Denmark, sometimes Finland, partly a term for the Scandinavian peninsula.

(source: www.ne.se)

English is a mandatory subjects at schools in Denmark for about 7 years. Which means that practically everyone at least understands the language.

About the term "Scandinavia": In the Scandinavian languages it is meant to be just Norway, Sweden and Denmark (the old Kalmar Union), but in English it often includes Finland, according to my encyclopedia.

I think in Denmark everyone speaks English. IN Sweden too but my personal opinion is that Danish people like to speak English when they meet a foreigner. I am Bulgarian and speak both Swedish and Danish (Swedish better) and everyone in Denmark switches to English as soon as they hear that you are a foreigner. This is not the case in Sweden, however. Swedes like it when you speak their language!!!:)
About Scandinavian films in general: it is very common in Scandinavian movies to have actors from different Scandinavian countries speaking their own language. Almost every contemporary Danish film which I have seen has at least one person who speaks Swedish. Or, take for example, Liv Ullmann in Bergman films (In fact I am not sure if she speaks Norwegian or just has a strong accent and mixes up some words, after all Swedish is not my mother tongue). Recently I saw also a Norwegian film, Monstertorsdag was the name I think, where one of the characters was a Danish guy who speaks Danish in the film.
In general people from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, when at a meeting for example speak their own languages and understand each other fairly good. And about Skåne: what I have heard from people from Skåne is that they understand Danish better than Danes understand skånska:) I myselv find it harder to understand skånska than Danish:)

How similar are Danish and Swedish actually? I get the feeling from reading these posts (I'm American, I speak English and know but have no cause to speak Latin and that's about it, but I can get by reading Italian because of all my Latin) that they must be pretty similar. Do they have many common words?

something that would really sætte enhver danskers pis i kog (make any danish persons piss boil) is to claim that A) Sweden has a better football team. and B) Sweden is the big brother.

though the first statement might be sort of true but not really, the second one is
pure nonsence. Historically speaking Denmark has been as powerful if not more powerfull as Sweden, on the euro political scene. In the early middle ages the danish king Valdemar Sejr founded a Danish empire that would come to include Norway, Sweden, parts of northern Germany and the baltic countries (though not all together at the same time, but almost).

The Calmar union led by Queen Margrethe the first included both Denmark, Norway and Sweden and was run from Copenhagen.

Anyway, I'm not really annoyed, it just sort of tickles in a bad way when people say that Sweden has the upper hand. I don't know why, because I love the Swedish language and the Swedish girls and *beep* Åmål, but it just sort of gets to me when somebody claims that Sweden is better.

I guess it goes back to 1864 when the danish nationalist movement really got started, back then we lost our possesions in northen germany and southern jutland and very few years before that Copenhagen had been annihilated by the brits, we had lost Norway to Sweden aswell as Skåne and Gotland. After that Denmark became sort of small, and I think it's been annoying people through the generations ever since.

A little reply, but here it comes.

Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are all very similar languages. I once heard a Swedish language professor say on that they almost could be considered different accents of the same language. So that should give an impression on how similar they are.

I guess 90% of the words are the same. That being said, the spelling and pronounsation is different. As a Norwegian, I can read both Danish and Swedish without difficulties, and I can have full conversations with Swedes without problems. However, Danish pronounsation is difficult, and in Norway we often say Danes speak with hot potatoes in their throats.

I've also been told that Norwegian is a good middle section between the other two, if anyone from another country wants to learn one of them. That if you know Norwegian, it's easier to understand the other two. Not sure if that's correct, though.

That being said, Norwegian is the only language I know of that has two official ways of writing, which should say something about how great differences there is between Norwegian accents. Considering that Norway is a country with only 5 million inhabitants, the difference in accents is huge - there even is accents I find hard to understand. Centuries ago, this actually made it hard for people to learn how to write, as the only official way of writing back then was based on Eastern and Southern Norwegian accent, but took no account on middle and western accents. So during the 19th century another official way of writing was constructed, based on those accents. I would hesitate to call these two ways of writing different languages, as they're both Norwegian - just different.