I recently learned that a lot of Danes don't have an asthmatic breathing problem like I thought they did.

To go back: I had one of those moments yesterday where I completely regressed into a child-like, or even pre-teen, state of mind. My Danish class was lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher for our first module, the type of young masters student with boundless energy and a desire to get us all talking and comfortable, who spends hours on our pronunciation and our lilts and moving around the classroom. Not only is my new class up five new flights of stairs, but we have a teacher that's been around for quite a while, that tends to talk quickly in Danish and look into his book a lot, as if he's reading to us, and we spend a lot of time in our seats, fairly confused and/or bored. 'This is our Everest,' I whispered to one of my classmates.

Work has been fairly draining this week. I slid into my seat at the start of class and immediately realized I had forgot to prepare for a presentation on American traditions, and so naturally, instead of taking it like a champ, I stared my teacher in the face, turned bright red, and said, "Sorry...no." It wasn't rude, it was more pleading and slightly tinged with self-loathing. I stammered and refused a few more times and got very quiet.

Learning a new language can be really frustrating, because it takes time, it takes a certain type of teacher, and it's often hard to actually use it in a country where people are either impatient or equally excited to show off their use of English. But I sat there and looked around at everyone else in my class and reminded myself of the fact that I'm one of the only people for whom this is merely a second language.

Well...language 2.5. I took Spanish for many, many years, so I shouldn't discount that. At the beginning of my time here in Denmark I kept interjecting Spanish to fill in the language gaps, such as 'porque', 'pero','y' and 'o'. I would start sentences in Spanish only to trail off as I realized it was the wrong language. Now that I've been taking Danish since September, I worry that I'm forgetting my Spanish because my mind turns into a total blank every time I try to recall my Spanish. My English...still intact.

I can't even keep two small parts of two other languages in my own head, and practically everyone else in my class is on their third or fourth language, so I sat there silently chastising myself for being such a loser. And while it is a travesty that I seem to have inherited a Dansk teacher with the world's smallest sense of humor, there are many good things that come out of breaking out of one's equivalent of fun-Danish-kindergarten and into bigger things. I feel like I'm entering the third grade again, where things are slightly harder and you don't color all the time and have real homework.

The flip-side of this new module is that we are spending a lot more time talking about Danish culture and cultural observations.

Which brings me to the Danish breathing thing.

I had noticed, when I began working with Danish faculty at DIS, that when I was talking to them they would often breath in very sharply for 1-2 seconds, repeatedly. The only way I can think to describe this is a very short, sharp, inhale that sounds like a combination of choking and gasping for air. Sometimes it was very faint, and other times I worried that my faculty were 1) stuck with an eternal hiccuping problem or 2) secretly having an anxiety attack because I was handing them too much work (in the case of one particular older gentleman).

I never mentioned this to anyone because I was sure I had just somehow gotten to know a random combination of Danes that were all either shocked at what I had to say, or all had breathing problems. Freakin' healthcare, am I right?

I learned in class yesterday, while discussing cultural body movements and tone of voice, that this is actually a way that Danes agree with someone while they are talking, since, as my teacher explained, 'It's too tedious and interrupting to keep saying 'yes, of course' or 'yeah, sure' while someone else is talking.'

In my mind this type of strange reasoning is similar to another Danish phenomenon: the fact that in order to not 'bother' anyone on the S-tog, you'll often hear people rustling their bags passive-aggressively instead of asking you to move.

So while you are talking, don't freak out if Danes intersperse your conversation with these little hiccup-gasps.