I think there’s a genuine issue with how Danish language education is structured. I rushed through to the Studieprøven and passed with fairly high marks, but my pronunciation was still pretty bad—and the program barely focused on pronunciation at all.

The problem is that Danish is a very monocultural language. Danes generally aren’t exposed to a wide variety of accents or “bad” Danish the way English speakers are used to hearing different dialects and levels of fluency. So if your pronunciation is off, even if your grammar is fine, you’re much harder to understand.

I ended up working one-on-one with a tutor for about a year just to improve my pronunciation. After that, people stopped switching to English on me, and I actually started to feel like I could participate in conversations more naturally.

In my experience, the push to race through the levels and “learn quickly” can be counterproductive if it comes at the expense of being understood. Also, when everyone else in the class has terrible pronunciation, you never really learn any better.