Describing People and Things

Describing something — the house is big, she has blue eyes, a man with a beard — is among the first things you'll want to do in Danish, and it leans on just three building blocks. You say what something is with er plus an adjective; you say what it has with har; and you tack on a feature with med ("with"). The one piece of machinery to get right is adjective agreement in the er-pattern. This page gives you the patterns, a stack of model sentences from simple to fuller, and a slot table so you can build your own.

Pattern 1: X er + adjective (the copula)

The workhorse. Er is the present tense of være ("to be"), and the adjective after it is predicative — it agrees with the subject in gender and number, exactly like the indefinite adjective endings:

• common, singular → base form: Bilen er *rød.*
• neuter, singular → add -t: Huset er *stort.*
• plural (any gender) → add -e: Bilerne er *røde.*

Notice the verb never changes for person or number — jeg er, du er, huset er, bilerne er — all er. Only the adjective moves. That's the opposite of English, where the verb changes (is/are) but the adjective is frozen (big stays big). In Danish the verb is frozen and the adjective flexes.

Pattern 2: X har + attribute (using "have")

For features a person or thing possesses — eyes, hair, a car, a name — use har ("has"), the present of have. Here the noun after har takes its own adjective ending (indefinite agreement), and the subject doesn't affect it.

A small but high-frequency point: øjne (eyes) and hår (hair) are the natural way to describe appearance — Danish says har blå øjne where English also says "has blue eyes," so this pattern transfers cleanly.

Pattern 3: en X med + feature (using "with")

To pin a feature onto a noun — a man with a beard, a house with a garden — use med ("with"). This builds a fuller noun phrase you can drop into either pattern above.

Model sentences: simplest to fuller

Build up gradually. Each step adds one element.

Asking a description (question)

To ask, invert the verb and subject — the adjective agreement is unchanged.

Saying it isn't (negative)

Add ikke after the verb; agreement still holds.

Fill-the-slot substitution table

Swap any cell to generate a new sentence. Keep the adjective agreeing with the subject's gender and number.

Run a single subject through the verbs to feel the difference: Hun *er høj (she *is tall) vs Hun *har langt hår (she *has long hair) vs en kvinde *med briller (a woman *with glasses).

The English-speaker pitfall: agreement and the missing article

Two errors dominate, both from English habits. First, English adjectives don't change, so learners forget the predicative -t/-e:

Second, English says "he is a tall one" or leans on "a," so learners insert an article before a bare predicative adjective. Danish doesn't — a predicative adjective stands alone with no article:

The article only returns when there's an actual noun: Han er en høj mand ("He is a tall man") is fine, because now høj is attributive, describing the noun mand. The rule: article + adjective needs a noun behind them. No noun, no article.

Word order note

All three patterns are ordinary main clauses, so the V2 rule applies: the finite verb (er, har) is the second element. Front something else — I dag er huset rent ("Today the house is clean") — and the subject inverts behind the verb, just like any Danish statement. The full schema is on the sentences overview and V2 rule pages.

Key takeaways

• X er + adjective for what something is — and the adjective agrees (base / -t / -e).
• X har + noun for what something has (eyes, hair, a garden).
• noun + med + feature to add a feature (en mand med skæg).
• The verb (er/har) never changes for person; the adjective is what flexes.
• No article before a bare predicative adjective: Han er høj, not Han er en høj.

For the agreement endings in full, see predicative vs attributive and indefinite agreement.