Learning a language is quite a complex matter. There are various cognitive processes involved like remembering newly attained vocabulary, monitoring your own output (which basically means attempting to identify your own mistakes) whilst applying the grammatical rules and syntactical structures that you are grasping control of, and many more.
However, not all parts of language learning are mere cognitive. Pronunciation as a matter of fact is very much based on a combination of listening and muscle memory. The latter is particularly important to be aware of as it is often overlooked by both teachers and learners. Repetition is key when building muscle memory. This goes for phonetical sounds, diphthongs, word chunks, connected speech, as well prosody (stress and intonation) and Danish has many of these, which we will cover further below.
But first of all, how does one develop listening skills and muscle memory? Well, let’s start with listening: surprisingly enough developing good listening skills is quite simple. All you have to do is listen and listen a lot. In fact, you don’t even have to understand what you’re listening to. At least not for this exercise to have an impact. Just by exposing yourself to the target language you’ll gradually become accustomed to the rhythm and sounds. And at some point, you’ll all of a sudden realise that you’re able to distinguish parts of the language that you weren’t able to before and hear things that you weren’t even aware off.
All whilst practising you’re listening skills you also want to work on developing your muscle memory. And as briefly mentioned above that is all about repetition. Here is how to do it: play an audio or video file of any kind, play it at a speed where you’re able to follow what is being said, pause it, repeat it, play it again and repeat it again until your comfortable with the sounds and rhythm. This exercise comes from the audiolingual method, which is not all that popular today, and it might send you back memory lane when you had to learn a foreign language as a kid. However, this method does work and does so very efficiently if done regularly and consistently. Try it out! It’s just like learning a new song that you’ve heard on the radio (or somewhere else if you don’t listen to the radio).
Building strong muscle memory will not only help you achieve a solid pronunciation, but it will also provide you with confidence along the way to fluency, as it usually motivates learners to engage more frequently with native speakers who to a large extent are the gamekeepers of the target language.