How Close are Danish and English?

I am about to start learning Danish with a friend who wants to learn it for fun. I wonder if anyone can tell me how different/similar Danish and English really are.

I think that the words that will make me confused the most will be words like "as, to, for, of, from, with" because in German, took it in high school, the words were sometimes very different to the English equivalent. I can not remember right of hand, but it seems like sometimes in German, you say "by" and in English you say "with."

I can not claim to be a language enthusiast, but I would really like to know about how Danish works compared with English.

Thanks much,
KRB

You will see similarities but it is not THAT close.

Perhaps you will find some answers on this site for Danish learners:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/1284/dansk/index.html

There's an online Danish-English-Danish dictionary there.

I studied in Denmark for a semester last year. When I started to learn Danish, I felt that it sounds closer to German than English (obviously, it's one of the languages rooted in the germanic language system). That also means that the language structure itself tends to be more german-like,i.e. systematic. In english, there are some rules, but then, you have thousands of exceptions.

Anyway, I found it not that hard to learn....but I have some troubles to pronounce some of the vowels though.

Have fun and good luck :)

Well, I find Danish to be rather different in some ways and rather the same in other ways. I have said before on this forum that Danish and Norwegian are perhaps the closest two languages to modern English than any other.

The main differences that I can think about in grammar are:

Formation of plurals (with and without definite articles) and definite articles.
Some aspects of sentence structure; but essentially English and Danish have the same structure.

Those are the ones that pop out in my mind first. I am sure I can think of some more later though.