For an absolute beginner, this is one of the better books on offer. It explains things clearly, and from the ground up.

That said, the cassettes - absolutely necessary, since Danish pronunciation is a bear - are maddening. They start with a stretch of English-language chatter about how wonderful the course is, a speech which becomes even more annoying with repeated listenings. After that, they just race through a series of barely differentiated diologues.

I would have found it more helpful to have learned how to pronounce some of the colloquial expressions the written chapters present.

That said, the written chapters are well-organized, build on each other, and are easy to follow. In a perfect world, the vocabulary would be better organized - we'd learn the verbs for sit, stand, and lie all at once, for example, instead of in three separate chapters - but I haven't found any other Danish text that does that, so perhaps there's some kind of royal edict against it.

Note to Americans: this book is VERY Brit-centric. Everyone in the diologues seems to be flying in from London and drinking tea.

This book is a good road map to Danish...it does an excellent job of explaining grammar and sentence structure.

What makes it frustrating for a beginner like me, however, is the way it approaches vocabulary. I've learned several other languages, and I like to learn new nouns in groups ("animals" "professions" "rooms of the house")

This book throws huge groups of unrelated words at you as it goes about explaining sentence structure, and I found them almost impossible to keep straight.

I ended up keeping a separate notebook to organize them myself!

Another important point: Pronunciation is the most difficult part of Danish, so I'd recommend buying this book WITH the cassettes. I bought the book alone, and now to get the cassettes - which are really necessary - I'm going to have to buy another copy of the book!

This appears to have been written for Danish speakers, because pronunciation cues are in the English section only!

Pronunciation is the hardest part of learning Danish, and a book that can't help you with that is pretty much useless.