Simple Danish Newsletter #32
Hi friends,
We’re happy to share that we’ve published a new episode of the Simple Danish Podcast, which you can find here: Ep. 16 Sport i Danmark.
Over the last three weeks, we’ve been sharing actionable tips for making your Danish learning journey more fun and sustainable in the long term. We did one post on how to make learning Danish fun and energizing, another on barriers to learning Danish and how to overcome them, and one on how to sustain your Danish learning journey.
Writing these posts helped us realize that these same tips might help us overcome our writing block (if we can call it that) when it comes to the Simple Danish Podcast.
Making the podcast was a lot of work—writing scripts, researching topics, recording, editing, writing transcripts, creating exercises, and finally, publishing on all the platforms. Some parts were fun, but others felt like a chore, which ultimately turned the podcast into a project that drained our energy. Hence, no new episodes for over a year.
So here’s a bit about how we applied our own advice and what we learned along the way:
What would this look like if it was fun?
As mentioned earlier, certain parts of the podcasting process are more enjoyable than others. In particular, I really like writing the scripts, coming up with topic ideas, and recording. Editing, formatting, and publishing—not so much. So, what if we could get rid of the less fun parts and focus on what we enjoy? For this episode, we’ve kept editing to a minimum. I didn’t spend hours cutting out every “umm” and “uh,” and instead focused on getting a good take. The audio might sound slightly less polished, but it probably mimics real-life situations even better.
What’s stopping you from getting started?
We used to think the scripts weren’t good enough, not funny enough, or either too long or too short. But then we asked ourselves, what’s the worst that could happen? If we don’t start, we’ll never get feedback, and we’ll never improve.
The 10:10:10 rule really helped here. Will it matter in 10 minutes that the podcast could have been better? Maybe a bit, and this episode might not be one of our most popular. Will it matter in 10 weeks? Probably not. What matters is that we got started and had the chance to improve in future episodes. In 10 years? We’ll probably have forgotten this one episode, and who knows what else we’ll have created by then.
Another game-changer was simplifying the transcript and exercises. Instead of producing a PDF transcript with exercises, we’re now posting full transcripts on our website as free text, with all the key words highlighted and translated at the bottom. This reduces a lot of the workload on our end.
In the end, the key was to just do it. Dust off the microphone, plug it in, and hit record. Once we got started, everything else flowed much more easily.
How do we make sure we keep going?
Time will tell, but for now, this newsletter is already a strong motivating factor. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we started it. We enjoy writing, researching topics, and creating the little idiom illustrations. Writing this newsletter gives us more energy than it takes, and now that we’re 31 weeks in, keeping the momentum going is easy—it’s part of our weekly routine. We’re striving to add the podcast into this rhythm, and knowing that you, our listeners, can benefit from it is a big motivator. Over time, we hope you’ll help keep us accountable too.
Our New Content: Sport I Danmark
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In this episode, we introduce you to the major sports in Denmark—football, handball (which was invented in Denmark, if you didn’t know!), and cycling, where we’ve been excelling recently thanks to Jonas Vingegaard!
We hope you liked this week’s newsletter. As always don’t hesitate to reach out if you have comments, suggestions or otherwise have questions 😊
Kram fra,
Antonina & Rasmus
Denmark&Me
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