Dear friends,

To our long term readers, thank you for your patience. To new readers, a warm welcome to the Simple Danish Newsletter. Thank you all for being here.

We hope you all have had a great start to the new year, and that your resolutions include lots of Danish – ours certainly does.

In these post-AI times, we have been a bit hesitant with continuing to create content online. When anyone can create a podcast at the click of a button, or get custom tailored advice in 5 seconds – does publishing online still make sense?

Recently, we have been toying around with using language models as a guide for learning Danish and for navigating life in Denmark, and for now – we’ve determined that there’s still a place for us. 

See, the advice we got was pretty much always correct, and often helpful. At the same time, it was just also… meh. It was bland, generic, and mostly without the nuances or considerations that you would get from talking to a real person.

We’ve recently written a guide titled When moving to Denmark works – and when it doesn’t (Subtitle: Questions you can ask yourself to figure out if moving to Denmark is right for you.)

Before writing it, we decided to ask ChatGPT for the same advice – and we have two problems with the answer it spat out.

First, what we immediately got was a list of pros and cons. But the thing is, a list – with no further considerations for your exact circumstances – is pretty useless. As an example, finding a job in Denmark will be very easy for some and very difficult for others. For some, learning Danish is going to be completely optional, whereas it will be mandatory for others. The answer would depend on your background, your education, which sector you are applying for jobs in, the geography of where you are applying (even though Denmark is a small country), and a million other factors.

Now, if you had asked a real person, they would have asked a few clarifying questions before spitting out an answer. Of course, you can try to prompt your way around it, but we found it somewhat difficult, and when we succeeded it was helped by the fact that we knew what kind of answer we were looking for (which kind of defeats the purpose of using AI).

The second problem we had with the answer requires a bit of background. AIs like ChatGPT are trained on huge amounts of data (the whole internet. And then some. I assume. I’m just guessing). From this data it has learned the likelihood of words occurring in sequence of each other, and from this it can and try to infer what is most likely to come next in a sentence. (And before you correct me – I am well aware there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes.)

But what happens if the content it is trying to mimic doesn’t exist? What if there is no content out there that describes what it is really like to live in Denmark? To some degree, it has learned to infer new information. To answer questions it has never seen before. But. The answers we get from ChatGPT are very similar to the first page of your Google search. What you get is SEO optimised content with click-baity titles. Lists of pros and cons that are all 90% identical, with no further substance.

And for now? We are not impressed with either.

I am not saying AI is bad – I have found many uses for it myself, and have certainly also used it when I probably would have been better off doing things the hard way (at least if I want to optimise for how much I learn, potentially more on that in a later post).

So for now, we have decided that there’s still a time and place for our content, and we wanted to express our sincere gratitude to all of you readers and listeners for being here.

We wish you all a Happy New Year, and all the best with your endeavours in 2026  

Kram fra,

Antonina og Rasmus

Denmark&Me

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P.S: Antonina and I are working on creating a community for internationals in Denmark. Over the years, we’ve realised that having a community might be the difference between surviving – and thriving in Denmark. Having access to help and people who have gone through the same thing as you can make or break you experience. If you are interested in hearing more you can do so here.​

P.P.S em-dashes in this article are placed by hand. So all mistakes are on us 😉