Am I Danish enough yet?

I was talking in the previous post about making my stay in Denmark official. About finally having the headspace and time to devote time to studying and learning what I need to do for the citizenship test and then figure out the steps towards applying for citizenship.

A couple of weeks earlier I had even turned down a position abroad, partly because I put getting citizenship higher on my list of priorities and I didn't want to lose all the accumulated years that are required for applying both on the working side and on the permanent residence (a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy, I guess). 

Nevertheless, the process looked relatively straightforward:

25 Nov 2026 • Citizenship test → Dec 2026 • Results → Jan 2027 • Send application → Early 2029 • Case processed → 2029 • Folketinget adopts naturalisation law → some months later • Constitutional ceremony = Danish citizen

I was already SUPER ready for this to take time. And I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I also knew it was a tough process, but all in all clear-cut, transparent. What I wasn't ready for was this whole Pandora's box of information and, especially, the discourse around this process.

Since late 2024 there has been a huge debate over the naturalisation process, with many people having issues with people receiving Danish citizenship. Because during the processing of a naturalisation bill, three of the thousands of applicants were singled out because statements they had made (particularly on social media) raised questions among some politicians about whether they held ‘undemocratic’ views.

T H R E E

The Naturalisation Committee held interviews with the three, amid substantial controversy about the procedure and its legal basis, but in the end they remained on the bill and it was ultimately approved, granting citizenship to everyone, including those three.

In 2025, only one bill was introduced, in April, because the October one was going to be merged with the April 2026 bill due to the heavier workload given that Denmark held the Presidency of the Council of the EU from 1 July–31 December. In January 2026, they introduced in Parliament the now infamous naturalisation bill L98 (containing 2,055 applicants + 1,120 children). When the general election was called in February, L98 lapsed. Then everyone on that list waited patiently for the election to run its course, and as soon as Mette Frederiksen formed her new government, everyone expected that it would be reintroduced.

But guess what??? It was not. Not right away anyway, and they weren't going to, but due to pressure from other political parties and press, it was finally decided that it would be reintroduced in the first half of 2027.

Since March this year, there has been an effective freeze on the review of ordinary citizenship applications, with more than 14,000 applicants waiting for an answer.

Because now, the desire is to upgrade the citizenship application process to involve some sort of screening for 'democratic' or, better said, 'undemocratic' views. A team is currently investigating the legality of it all and possible ways of adding this extra step. But who can decide what is democratic or undemocratic? Where would be boundary be? And in which context? And what about the native-born Danes who hold these the very same, undemocratic, views? They too exist.

And I get the intention of ensuring that new Danes really are Danes at heart, but on the other hand, how would one ensure that the things people say are actually true, and they aren't lying? The statements that raised questions about those three applicants were found on social media. Then wouldn't that just make someone stay off social media or use a pseudonym instead for the entire duration of the application or maybe longer?

One of the concepts that I have been studying for the test was the Danish Constitution and the rights it ensures for everyone. One of these rights is the right to express oneself. That makes me wonder how a future system that screens applicants' statements, opinions and viewsis is supposed to distinguish between genuinely undemocratic views and the democratic ones that the citizenship seekers are expected to understand and embrace.

Reading through the Danish press horrifies me. It's making me more and more discouraged by this entire thing. Just the number of applications to be processed is already scary and that would definitely add HUGE delays if the freeze were to stop today (it won't but let's imagine).

But the thing that disgusts me the most is the tone with which politicians talk about the citizenship seekers, making assumptions about their background and generalizing, giving me such a weird vibe. Take this debate about introducing a naturalization bill in the first half of 2024 for example. At 15:27 Mikkel Bjørn challenges the ministry's usual rhetoric that many applicants are Western Europeans, with some hard-working Eastern Europeans, by reading out names such as Yasin, Yusuf, Ali Hussein, Ahmed and Muhammad. He then argues that immigration and naturalisation have made labels such as British, German, European and even Danish “diluted concepts”, before describing citizenship as an investment on behalf of the Danish people that should only be granted when there is strong reason to believe the applicant will benefit Denmark socially, culturally and economically. 

Where are all these serial naturalization seekers, travelling from country to country collecting citizenship like they're Pokemon badges? Because who spends years building a life somewhere, meeting all the requirements for residence and integration and then going through administrative hell just to add another passport to their collection? Make it make sense ... pls. 

Moreover, the way they're describing getting Danish citizenship as 'the finest gift Denmark can give' (Ulrik Knudsen - Danmarksdemokraterne's spokesperson on naturalisation according to this article + official Ministry of Immigration and Integration article).

I feel the need to scream ... what about the Law of Jante???

For context, the Law of Jante is the Scandinavian cultural idea that you shouldn't think you're better, more important, or more special than everyone else. I was hit with this idea when I first started university here back in 2010. It is often associated with the egalitarianism behind Denmark's famously flat social and workplace hierarchies.

Back to the topic ... how can Danish politicians and even some Danish citizens, who very often invoke this law towards immigrants coming to Denmark, now stand up and say that getting Danish citizenship is 'the finest thing one can possibly attain'? Morten Bødskov, the Minister for Immigration and Integration here in Denmark, recently said that in an answer to a question about his position on the introduction of conditional citizenship. I guess that it is a law only for immigrants ... not everyone in Denmark. Pardon me!!

And his answer was that he would like Denmark eventually to be able to implement conditional citizenship, because people should earn it both before and after getting it. LIKE WHAT? Also ... the example he was asked about concerned committing a criminal offence that results in a prison sentence. But ... somehow, given the current international climate everywhere, I can imagine it evolving even further. What worries me is that it is enough for them to find a way to implement this, and once they had a foot in the door, they would then be able to change it into whatever they wish.

But any such system would have to contend with Denmark's international obligations, including the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and the European Convention on Nationality, so for now let's say we're safe? :D

Still, how is it OK that getting citizenship isn't the final goalpost? Why are they always looking to move the goalpost? How much stricter can the citizenship application process get?

I was talking with a colleague from work, who applied twice for citizenship and was rejected both times because the rules changed while his applications were ongoing.

I have such a bad taste in my mouth that over the past two weeks, I have slowed down my studying, and I am rethinking whether I should wait or keep trying. I am usually not a quitter, but the more I learn and read, the more I am getting discouraged.

Maybe having this critique means I am not a Dane at heart ...

Indfødsretsprøven aka Danish Trivia Contest

Dear reader from the void, 

In line with my words from the previous post, this is one huge thing I desperately wanted to share with the world. Ahahahah ... 

A month ago, just before my birthday, I decided that I really wanted to give myself a present, something that lingers, which isn't material but holds great value. And that something was, the first step towards applying for the Danish citizenship - the Indfødretsproven. Which is very much a very elaborate and somewhat difficult form of Danish Trivia :D. 

And no, it wasn't because I had been here for a fixed amount of years, nor it was right after the rules allowed me to apply having passed a determinate amount of years after I had gotten my permanent residence. And no, my birthday, like I said, isn't a round birthday ... it just happened to be a moment in my life when felt I could add the pressure of studying for a test on top of everything going on in my life. It's something that has been on my mind for several years, but I was doubting of my ability to study and do a test in Danish, and I was thinking that I will never be able to pass it. 

But I have been here for 16 years in August. Can you imagine? 16 years. I was a baby when i came to study the Innovation Management masters in Herning, in 2010, and I never imagined at that time that after finishing my studies I would build my life here. I guess I am one of the success stories for integration (self proclaimed :P), having studied here, learned the language, have a job, friends, a family and can easily find my way around the highly advanced, online bureaucracy of the Danish system. 

And so, with renewed faith in myself, acknowledging that I am actually capable to learn and to understand the questions of the test, I decided to enroll myself for the Nov 25th test of 2026. Giving me more than enough time to master and hopefully successfully pass the test with more than 36 points (which is the minimum to pass). Enrolling means paying a fee of kr950 . And that is separate from the kr6300 fee I will have to pay to actually apply for the citizenship after passing the test. 😅 Yes please, faint. I nearly did myself too when I learned that. 

The test itself isn't exactly easy. It consists of 45 questions divided into three sections: Danish history and society (35), current events from the previous six months (5), and Danish values (5). To pass, you need at least 36 correct answers, including 4 out of 5 values questions. And the first 35 questions come from this 250ish pages PDF from the SIRI website. 

The preparation page also has tests from previous exams (there are two tests every year) which is what I started with, to get a general feel for the questions, and NO SURPRISE THERE, i didn't pass. But, the more I was doing these tests, with no preparation beforehand, i was getting better and better. And this you can see in the graph below, because guess what, I recorded my answers. And I made a Google Sheets page just for this. Don't worry, I'll brag about my methodology in just a second, I know you're dying to read just let me finish about this graph 😝. 

The more I was going through these tests, the more I was seeing patterns, repeats, and learning the correct answers that I had missed the first go round. After the first pass through all these 13 tests, my pass rate has been only 3/13. In 2020 and the first test of 2021, there were 40 questions, and the minimum to pass was 32 (just in case you saw the pass rate intersecting with the 33 correct answers from 11/2020). 

Fig.1 - Answers gotten right after doing once the 13 available tests on the SIRI page

So yeah, the sheet. Me being a huge numbers nerd, after a couple of tests, I noticed that the concepts repeated. Maybe not using the exact words, but the idea was the same. And I wanted to have a way to measure my progress. And thus I exported the questions from the PDFs to the sheets, with their correct answers, and then with my answers, I grouped them into questions asking the same things via the 'Compacted Questions' field, and I started creating different pivots based on the data to measure different KPIs, to assist me in my learning journey. 

• Which are the most repeated questions?

                - Those i need to know basically by heart

• Are there any current events questions that became general knowledge in following years. 

                - Just curious :P

• Are there questions that repeated themselves which despite seeing them in multiple tests, I still fail?

                - Which areas to focus my learning on and maybe even start making diagrams :D - cause I am also a visual learner :P

I told my colleagues at work that I enrolled for this. Some of them have been asking me if I took this test for years. And all of them agree that if they've been asked to take this test today, they, as real legal and born danes, they will not be able to pass this test. I found that funny, but also a testament that it's not an easy test to pass, and even when I will feel prepared, that I should still pay attention and read the question twice before answering, because maybe, just maybe, now they're asking the reverse of the question that you're thinking about. I've seen it happen more than once during my first pass of the 13 tests. 

I've had all sort of funny thoughts since I started studying for the test. One of them, was to build myself an app. I have the data, all i need is the shell and the functions. And I was envisioning adding a learning section too, and maybe even an AI agent to discuss with some of the topics or wrong questions when in doubt. I wanted it all. 

But first, I thought to myself, let me Google a bit. Maybe someone already thought of it. And I discovered an entire little industry I never knew existed. So many websites bragging with 1000 questions from tests, others with 3000 questions from tests, with randomized tests made from these many questions, and some costing an arm and a leg ... and others hardly anything. I admit, I was tempted. More than anything, tempted to test what they said about the number of questions they have available, when my humble 13 tests database, only has 570 questions with repeated concepts included, and only 297 unique questions. I was also thinking, maybe they have an AI doing all the possible questions for each of the chapters in the book? Maybe. And maybe they've changed the wording too. You never know. Nor I ... cause I will not pay ahahha. 

And in the middle of all this googling, I found one singular website - treasure trove of information and functionalities, exactly like how I wanted my app to be. Safe to say ... no app will ever be now made by me hahahah. Because ... (hear the angels singing in choir) ... NearlyDanish.com exists. And it's an amazing website, ran by one guy, who has been helping students pass the citizenship test for 6-8 years now, I think fully maintained from donations and kind heart. He even holds Kahoot tests twice a week starting 3 months prior to the tests. And I know all this, because I also saw some of his Youtube videos from the Kahoot tests he does with students. I'm telling you, this guy is god sent. 

There is only one thing that's bugging me. Until you participate in one of his Kahoots oficially, you cannot create an account for yourself on your own. He has a section with tests from all sections of the book, and all the tests from many years ago, more than I have, having started now. But only if you have an account, you can gamify your learning via leaderboards. And me, a huge gaming nerd, I WANT THAT. And that I learned by reading his website source code, cause sure, there's no information on that precisely, and I haven't seen all his Youtube videos to see if he's explaining the process in any of them. 

But I will be using the heck out of his website, until I will get on that leaderboard. And when I do, beware other students, beware. There's a new sheriff in town, and her name is Iziss aka Danish Trivia Master (blue-purple lightsaber). And yes, for this amount of work this guy has put into the website, I will also be donating at some point. Now I am thinking, what if I donate now via Mobile Pay? With a question ... will he add me to the user base of his website? 😏 

Ten years later ...

Nice to see you again dear reader. Let me ask you a question ... 

Do you know how, in musicals, when emotions become too big, the characters suddenly burst into song?

That's always been how blogging felt to me.

When I started this blog back in 2008, I never intended to become a consistent writer. I simply wrote whenever I felt the need to share whatever was going on inside my head.

And recently, after almost ten years since my last post, life became too intense to keep it all in.

So I dusted off the old blog... and here I am.

In the process, I felt like an archaeologist uncovering buried treasures. I got to rediscover an older version of myself and my crafting hobby. I had forgotten how resourceful that younger me was. She was crafty, creative, frugal, and ridiculously solution-oriented. Just have a look at some of the posts from 2015—I was even making my own stencils.

But that wasn't all.

The Wayback Machine had preserved a snapshot of an even older version of the blog, back when it was a strange mixture of Romanian and English, shortly after I moved to Denmark to study Innovation Management.

Reading those posts was like opening a real time capsule. I loved seeing how endlessly curious I was back then—a quality that, thankfully, hasn't changed much.

Along with the excitement of rediscovery came a little sadness.

The version of the blog that the Wayback Machine saved doesn't really exist anymore. Neither do the posts from the very beginning. I hope I backed them up onto some forgotten CD, but honestly, I have no idea.

At some point around 2013, I desperately wanted a clean slate. Instead of simply drafting the old posts, I deleted them all.

Looking back, I wish I hadn't.

Still, just like in that very first post all those years ago, this is my new Corners of My Reality—only now it looks like the old one again (trust me, I spent more than I want to admit on finding the old template and updating it with 2026 functionality - yes, the scrolling. Try it. It's so cooool :D). And this time, I'm keeping everything. Because the person writing these posts hasn't really changed all that much.

Not even age-wise.

I'm still 24 years old...

...just with 14 years of experience. 😄

I still love creating things, whether with paper, glue, code, or pixels. I love games, numbers, history, books, travelling and random rabbit holes that begin with a quick search on Google and end 3 hours later after a huge converation with ChatGPT. 

By day, I'm a Business Intelligence Analyst, so my obsession with numbers finally has a socially acceptable explanation. And I say that because there have been plenty of games where I spent more time building Google Sheets dashboards than actually playing them. :P

So yes ... life became loud enough that i finally felt like ranting again. 

See you in the next one, whenever it will be. 

Until then, have the most amazing day ...