Odense Universitet

I have seen exchange students life in several countries: Spain, France, England, Holland, Poland and Denmark. Now i can claim that the exchange student life in denmark gives the most complete experience, over there there are people from all over the world who interact all together, one can get in touch with so many different cultures, and most than anything there are really few people from the same country, this means that there are not groups formed of french, of italians, of germans, of americans, of irish but there is a real mix. I wanted to say this because this i have seen a situation like this only in Odense.

For every exchange students in Denmark it's not so important to learn danish, one can communicate with everybody there in english since all the danes speak perfect english. For me it has been a very good opportunity to improve my english; among the exchange students there were a lot of native speakers too.

The experience is well worthy. Get rid of stereotypes and try to get to know people. Do not think that your way of having fun is the best, and the only one. Be open-minded, and take part in every activity and meeting that you can. Then, enjoy the best year of your life. And suddenly you will realise that you have changed.

Everyone in Denmark knows the english language so I didn't have any particular problem of communication, both in the host country and university. At the beginning it was pretty difficult because I had little knowledge of english language, but after 2/3 months I was able to interact easly.

Having pretty good skills in english and german, I could quickly cope with written danish. Oral danish was something else. We didn't have enough course to reach sufficiently high level in danish (only 4h/week) but being deeply interested in scandinavia, I took the best of it.

My experience was that when you travel to a country that has a main language that you can´t comunicate in, it´s going to be more difficult to make friends of that country, not exchange students as you. But I understand, that´s why I tried to learn danish as far as I could.