Dansk Grammatik Fejl in Prøve i Dansk 3: 20 Correction Drills

Prøve i Dansk 3 (PD3) has no grammar paper. Nobody asks you to conjugate a verb or to name a word class. Grammar is assessed inside your writing and your speech, as one part of what SIRI’s assessment guides call lingvistisk færdighed. The written guide spells that out as “ordvalg, syntaks, morfologi, retskrivning”: choice of words, sentence structure, word forms and spelling. The matching heading in the oral guide reads “ordvalg, syntaks, morfologi, udtale”, with pronunciation in the place of spelling [official: Bedømmelsesvejledning, written May 2025 and oral December 2024].

So grammar sits inside one of three things the examiners read for in the 200-word text: linguistic skill (lingvistisk færdighed: word choice, syntax, morphology, spelling). The other two are pragmatisk færdighed (do you do what the task asks: describe, explain, argue) and diskursiv færdighed (is the text organised and connected). A text with flawless verb endings that never answers the third point of the task is not a strong answer. The reverse is also true, and it is the reason for this page: errors that disturb the reader weigh heavily in the language grade, because SIRI’s descriptions sort grades by how far errors disturb reading.

PD3 has no grammar paper [official: BEK 1687/2025 bilag 1]. The 4 is our count of the list in the heading of SIRI’s written assessment guide. The last two figures describe this page.

The target for the test is stated in the guide’s list of learning goals for writing: the candidate “kommunikerer med en forholdsvis høj grad af syntaktisk og morfologisk korrekthed”, and “retskrivningen er overvejende korrekt” — a fairly high degree of correctness in syntax and word forms, and spelling that is correct for the most part [official]. “Fairly high” is not “complete”. The descriptions of the three anchor grades make the scale visible.

For the e-mail, the description of grade 02 is the most concrete sentence about grammar in either guide. It says there may be “enkelte eksempler på fejl i verbetider, substantivendelser og i elementær syntaks”: a few errors in verb tenses, in noun endings and in elementary sentence structure [official]. Those three named things are tense, endings and elementary sentence structure (elementær syntaks; word order is the commonest case of it), and they account for five of the six areas below.

SIRI’s own example of an answer graded 12 is not free of errors. Its e-mail contains “min kørekort” (the noun is an et-word: mit kørekort) and “i din første dag” (standard Danish: på din første dag). The examiners’ reasoning still calls the e-mail’s formulations linguistically correct “i overvejende grad”, for the most part [official: written guide, answer and reasoned assessment for grade 12; the two corrections are ours]. That is the standard you are held to: a text that works, written by a person who is still learning.

Two limits on what follows. The choice of these six areas is ours. We know of no published count of which errors PD3 candidates make most often, so we make no claim about frequency. We chose areas where Danish differs from English in a rule that can be stated in one line and checked in your own text in a minute. And single sentences are easier than a text: the drills teach you to see a pattern, and the test asks you to keep it under control while you are thinking about your argument.

In a Danish declarative main clause (a statement) the finite verb comes second. If the clause begins with anything other than the subject — a time, a place, an adverb such as derfor or desværre, or a whole subordinate clause — the subject moves to the place after the verb. Danish teaching calls this omvendt ordstilling or inversion. English keeps subject before verb (“Yesterday I worked”), which is why the error is so easy to make.

The last row is the over-correction. Once inversion has been learned, some writers invert after every small word. The conjunctions og, men, eller, for join two clauses and take no place in either. Derfor, alligevel and desuden are adverbs: they do take the first place, and the verb follows them.

After at, fordi, hvis, når, selvom, som, der and the other words that open a subordinate clause, the order is subject, then the adverb (ikke, aldrig, altid, også, gerne), then the finite verb. (If the word that opens the clause is itself the subject, as in som ikke kan lide møder, there is no separate subject, and the adverb still comes before the verb.) In an ordinary main clause the adverb comes after the verb. This difference is one concrete case of what the guides mean when they ask for control of sentences with several subordinate clauses.

A quick test for your own text: find every ikke. If it stands in a clause opened by one of the words above, it should be to the left of the verb.

English has one “his” and one “her”. Danish has two sets. Sin, sit, sine point back to the subject of the same clause, when that subject is third person singular (han, hun, den, det or a noun naming one person or thing); for jeg and du the words are min, din and so on. Hans, hendes, dens, dets point to somebody else — or are used when the owner is not the subject of that clause. With a third-person plural owner the word is always deres (the first and second person plural are vores and jeres).

The second row matters in the test because it is not an error a spell checker or a dictionary can find: the sentence is grammatical and says something you did not mean. An examiner reading it has to stop and work out whose mother it is, which is exactly the kind of error that disturbs reading (that reading of “disturbing” is ours, not a SIRI definition).

Almost every Danish noun is an en-word or an et-word, and there is no dependable rule for which. It has to be learned with the noun. The gender then decides three more things: the definite ending (-en or -et), the adjective ending after en/et, and the article in front of an adjective (den or det). One wrong gender can therefore produce three errors in a line.

One slip in this group deserves a separate look, doubling the definite: det store problemet for det store problem. Norwegian and Swedish do double it, so anyone who has met those languages should be careful. The last row shows the first slip in SIRI’s grade-12 example quoted above: a possessive takes the gender of its noun, so mit kørekort.

Prepositions cannot be translated one for one, and the dictionary you may bring to the writing test is the right tool for them: look up the verb or adjective, not the preposition. Some pairings are worth knowing by heart because they come up whenever you write about work, family or opinions.

Danish and English mostly agree here, which makes the differences easy to overlook. Use the past tense (datid) when the time is finished and named: i går, sidste år, i 2020, da jeg var barn. Use the perfect (førnutid) when the time is not finished or not named, and the result still counts. Task 2B of the writing test begins with your own experience, so in that task the first paragraph of your text is where this shows.

Each drill shows one sentence in three versions. One is correct standard Danish; the other two carry an error from the group named in its heading. In the sin or hans drills the owner is always the person the sentence is about (the subject), as the English meaning shown after your answer makes clear. The checker reports your score for each of the six groups and tells you which rule to read again. If scripts are switched off, the two tables under the tool give every correct sentence, its English meaning, the wrong versions and the rule.

A drill score says little about the test, because in a drill you are looking for an error and you know which kind. In the writing room you have 2½ hours for both tasks and may use dictionaries; that leaves time for a check at the end, and a check works best as separate passes, one pattern at a time [official: BEK 1687/2025 bilag 1 pt 3.22 for the time and aids; the method is our advice].

Then put the grammar back in its place. The writing grade is set by the whole text, and SIRI’s guide tells examiners to judge language, not knowledge of the topic. A weaker and a stronger answer to the same task, with the differences marked against the official descriptions, are in the model-answers guide; the parts and timing of the written day are in the written exam guide; and because the oral grade counts twice, read the pass rule before you decide how many evenings grammar deserves. In the oral, most of the same areas are heard, not read (spelling drops out, pronunciation comes in), and a slip you correct yourself in the next breath shows that you control the form. The six-week plan puts these drills in week 3.