With Language Comes Culture
This interview, by Linda Haglund for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, appeared in the winter edition of their magazine, SCAN.
Danish language teacher Dorte Tulet arrived in New York in 1982 after spending a couple of years in Los Angeles, and 11 years ago she started working as a Danish instructor. Today she teaches Danish at Scandinavia House on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“Working in adult education is great. Everybody is highly motivated in class and we have so much fun together. Our classes are often multicultural and even if we all come from different backgrounds, we form a unit!”
Dorte tells us that there are many reasons for people to want to learn Danish. “The vast majority of my students have a Danish speaking significant other or Danish ancestry, but there are also students that just want to learn a new and exotic language. Learning new languages is a great tool for developing your communication skills and exercising your brain.”
Sometimes Dorte’s students are New Yorkers who are interested in moving to Denmark. “There’s a big media interest in Scandinavia today. Denmark was nominated as one of the happiest countries in the world and Nordic gastronomy keeps on finding a bigger audience in New York. With language comes culture, and when you start learning a new language you’ll also learn about the society and the history.”
Dorte recommends that her students take more than one course of Danish and that they watch Danish films and TV-series between the classes.“To maintain or even improve a language, it’s important that you use it often and remember to work individually between the group meetings. Everything helps—reading, listening or even re-watching a TV-show. There’s a lot of good TV being made in Denmark right now!”
Dorte Tulet will teach Danish II this spring at NYU SPS.
Other Scandinavian language classes will include:
Middle Eastern language classes will include:
East Asian:
For all language courses offered this spring click: 2017 courses and choose your language area to browse.