Breakdown of Vi vil bestille mad på en lille café i centrum.
Questions & Answers about Vi vil bestille mad på en lille café i centrum.
In this sentence vil mostly means “want to”:
- Vi vil bestille mad … ≈ “We want to order food …”
- Danish doesn’t have a strict future tense like English. The present tense often expresses future, and vil adds a nuance of intention / desire.
So it’s more natural to understand it as “we want to”, not just a neutral future “we will”.
Yes, you can, but the nuance changes:
Vi bestiller mad …
= “We are ordering / we’re going to order food …” (a plan, arrangement, or something happening now/soon, more matter‑of‑fact)Vi vil bestille mad …
= “We want to order food …” (focus on wanting / intending to do it)
Both are possible; which one you use depends on whether you want to stress the intention/desire (vil) or just state what’s (going to be) happening (simple present).
- bestille mad literally means “to order food”, usually in a restaurant, café, by phone, online, etc.
- købe mad means “to buy food”, which can be:
- groceries in a supermarket
- takeaway
- any buying of food in general
If you’re talking about sitting down in a café and ordering from a menu, bestille mad is the natural expression.
You don’t normally drop mad here; bestille alone is too vague unless the context is crystal clear.
In Danish, mad is often used as an uncountable / mass noun, similar to English “food”:
- Vi vil bestille mad = “We want to order food.”
- No article is needed, just like English “We want to order food,” not “a food”.
If you wanted to be more specific, you could say for example:
- Vi vil bestille noget mad = “We want to order some food.”
- Vi vil bestille maden = “We want to order the food” (referring to specific, known food, e.g. “the food we talked about”).
Prepositions with places where you eat/drink can be a bit different from English:
på en café
is the normal way to say “at a café” in the sense of going there to eat/drink.
It focuses on the activity (being a customer there).i en café
is rare and would sound odd in most contexts. Literally “in a café” (inside the building), but even then Danes usually still say på café.
So:
- Vi vil bestille mad på en lille café ≈ “We want to order food at a little café.”
Use på for cafés, restaurants, bars in this “going there as a guest” sense.
Because café is a common gender noun in Danish:
- Common gender: en café
- Neuter gender: et (e.g. et hus, “a house”)
So you must say:
- en café, den café
- en lille café = “a small/little café”
Using et lille café would be wrong, because café does not belong to the et group.
- en lille café = “a little café” (non‑specific, could be any one; the listener doesn’t know which)
- den lille café = “the little café” (a specific one that both speaker and listener can identify – e.g. one you already mentioned)
So in your sentence:
- Vi vil bestille mad på en lille café i centrum.
→ You don’t have a specific café in mind; just somewhere small in the city centre.
If you had already talked about a particular café, you might say:
- Vi vil bestille mad på den lille café i centrum.
→ “We want to order food at the little café in the centre.”
i centrum is a set phrase meaning “in the city centre / downtown”:
- i centrum = in the central area of the town/city, no article.
You almost never say i centrumet in this meaning; that sounds odd. If you want to be more explicit, you can say:
- i byens centrum = “in the city’s centre”
- i centrum af byen = “in the centre of the city”
But the standard everyday version is simply i centrum.
Yes. In this context, centrum means the central part of a town or city, the area with shops, cafés, etc.:
- i centrum ≈ “in the city centre / downtown”
It usually refers to the urban centre, not just the geometric middle point of something.
In Danish, adjectives before a noun in the indefinite form go before the noun, like in English:
- en lille café = “a little café”
- et lille hus = “a little house”
lille is slightly irregular:
- Singular, indefinite:
- en lille café
- et lille hus
- Plural (indefinite and definite):
- små caféer / de små caféer = “small cafés” / “the small cafés”
So:
- lille is used for singular.
- små is used for plural.
The position (before the noun) is normal: adjective + noun.
Danish main clauses must have the finite verb in second position (V2), but modifiers like place phrases can move:
Neutral version:
- Vi vil bestille mad på en lille café i centrum.
You can front a place phrase for emphasis, but keep the verb second:
- I centrum vil vi bestille mad på en lille café.
- På en lille café i centrum vil vi bestille mad.
What you cannot do in a main clause is break V2, for example:
- ✗ I centrum vi vil bestille mad … (wrong; verb not in second position)
Within the cluster bestille mad på en lille café i centrum, the order [verb] [object] [more specific place] [more general place] is natural:
- bestille mad på en lille café i centrum
(“order food at a little café in the city centre”)
Switching to i centrum på en lille café is possible but less natural in this context.
Approximate pronunciations (in simple English-like terms):
mad
- Roughly like “ma” with a long open æ sound, plus a very soft d at the end.
- IPA (approx.): [mæːð] – the d is not a hard “d”; it’s a soft, almost “th‑like” sound or very weak.
café
- Similar to many languages: ka-FEY
- Stress on the second syllable; final é is a long e sound.
- IPA: [kʰaˈfeː]
centrum
- The c is pronounced like s, not like “k”: roughly SEN-trum.
- The tr cluster is a bit more “crunchy” than in English, with a Danish r.
- IPA (approx.): [ˈsɛnˀtʁɔm]
The most surprising part for English speakers is often the soft d in mad.
Yes, you can, and it’s very natural:
- Vi vil spise på en lille café i centrum.
= “We want to eat at a little café in the city centre.”
Nuance:
- vil spise focuses on the act of eating there.
- vil bestille mad focuses more on ordering food there.
In many everyday contexts, both can describe essentially the same plan (going to a café to have a meal).