Hi! I've been interested in learning Danish since reading the English translation of Lucky Per, by Henrik Pontoppidan. I loved the book, and Pontoppidan is recognized in Europe as one of the greats (he won a Nobel Prize) but he hardly has any works translated into English. The idea I came up with then is that I would buy a book that covers the basics of Danish, and then once I feel as though I have a good foundation, I would start reading Pontoppidan's novel Det forjættede Land (500+ pages) and develop my Danish skills that way, studying vocabulary from the novel and figuring out the grammar by parsing the author's sentences.
What I'm wondering is whether any of you think this is a bad approach. I like this idea because I don't want to spend months or years studying out of textbooks or taking Danish lessons and reading children's stories, or other lit written in simple Danish, when my goal is specifically to read Pontoppidan. I understand I'll have to look up a ton of words and that there will be sentences with grammar I won't be able to make sense of, but I'm prepared to go at a grueling pace and not to fully understand the story. This approach seems fun to me (maybe I'm weird) and I like the idea of not seeing this goal of mine (reading Pontoppidan) as something daunting and that requires a ton of preparation. (I feel like I want to run a marathon, and so I know I need to do some training, but think as long as I finish the race, no matter how long it takes, I'll be good- avoiding spending time training is a higher priority than finishing the race quickly.) I wonder though whether any of you can tell that it'd be a mistake to do it this way. Maybe one of you thinks I'll get frustrated and discouraged more easily than I do. I'll just say that I loved Lucky Per so I'm motivated to read this book and don't think I'll get discouraged. I also expect not to get discouraged because there are some other books by Pontoppidan I want to read, untranslated works by another author I'm interested in (Jens Peter Jacobsen), and I'm excited by the idea of discovering what other Danish literature is out there that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
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