A Practical Danish Lesson

If you've ever learned a language, you can probably relate to the rather contrived exercises used to practice. For example, one of the few topics I can talk about in Danish is which floor you live on: Bor du i stuen? Nej, jeg bor på tredje sal. Although the exercise gives practice in answering and asking questions, using ordinal numbers, and a few other topics, I don't anticipate using this too much in daily life.
So, I laughed today when I found myself in a situation that could be part of some contrived language learning video. I had my first volunteer shift today for KBHFF, the local produce co-op that I joined. KBHFF has a central distribution center. Another volunteer picked up the produce from there and brought it to our location. Then, two of us had to weigh the produce into the number of bags that had been ordered for the week.
The produce is sorted into reusable cloth bags. Of course, the first thing we needed to do was count the number of bags out that we needed to fill. This week and last week we covered numbers in my Danish class and we had a quiz on them last night, so I was prepared when the other girl weighing produce with me started counting out loud in Danish. We also had to use numbers to talk about how many leeks everyone got in their bags and how many grams of mushrooms to weigh out. At the end when we were done, we counted the bags again to be sure we had it right.
Of course the other volunteers spoke English and were happy to speak it with me, but for things like counting and talking to each other about logistics, Danish was easiest. I was happy to be able to pick out the numbers. It was an effective lesson for me, but somehow I don't think that "Elizabeth Volunteers at the Food Co-op" will be featured after "Nina Borrows a Key," the video we watched this week in Danish class.

Our filled bags all lined up and counted.