How difficult is Norwegian?

Is Norwegian hard to learn?

I am a teacher of Norwegian, and I see that all my students have to work hard to learn the language properly. Learning a new language is always challenging, but what is more difficult differs from person to person. However, in this article, I will try to give you an answer, based on my own experiences of teaching. The examples in this article are all taken from Bokmål, the most commonly used written standard.

Norwegian and English have similarities in the vocabulary

In our time, English has a strong influence on the Norwegian language, and English words are often used for modern phenomena. However, there have always been similarities between English and Norwegian, because they both belong to the Germanic language group.

Modern English has a huge amount of French loan words, but there is still a large group of words that can easily be compared. If you know Dutch or German, you will even more easily understand parts of the Norwegian vocabulary, as you see in the table below. Listen to the sound file to hear the Norwegian pronunciation.

English	house	pipe	louse	nut	book	stream
Dutch	huis	pijp	luis	noot	boek	stroom
German	Haus	Pfeife	Laus	Nuss	Buch	Strohm
Norwegian	hus	pipe	lus	nøtt	bok	strøm

However, once upon a time, the English language borrowed an large amount of words from Scandinavia. Through their presence, the Vikings influenced English, bringing it closer to the Scandinavian languages. The next table gives you some examples.

EN	Cake	Flat	Link	Rotten	Thrive	Window	Egg	Knife	Leg
NO	Kake	Flat	Lenke	Råtten	Trives	Vindu	Egg	Kniv	Legg

Norwegian sentences — a bit like in English

But how do you make the sentences? As a matter of fact, Norwegian and English phrases often have the same word order. In Norwegian, you can say:

Jeg har ikke vært der

Which can be translated literally, word by word, into:

“I have not been there”

In many other languages (like German), you would make a sentence with another word order. Some scientists even say that the English way of making sentences comes from the Vikings, just like parts of the English vocabulary, as mentioned before.

But sometimes it’s done differently. The subject and the verb swap places in certain sentences. That’s what is done when you ask questions, and also in quite a few other cases.

Here is an example:

Jeg må gå nå = “I must go now” (literally translated)

But if you put the word nå (now) at the beginning, you suddenly have to change the word order:

Nå må jeg gå —  literally translated as “Now must I go”

In order to follow this up, I would like to suggest some music. This man is in a hurry, and he says that “he has to go now”.

The easy Norwegian verbs

Putting the verbs on the right place can sometimes be tricky, but conjugating them is easy. In English, a verb must usually agree with its subject in number and person. In Norwegian, that’s not so, as you can see from the example below. In this table, you see the coniugasion of the English verb “to be”, and the Norwegian translation next to it.

English	Norwegian
I am	Jeg er
You are	Du er
He/she is	Han/hun er
We are	Vi er
You are	Dere er
They are	De er

As you can see, the verb does not change. And also the past tense is easy: “I was” is jeg var, while “we were” is vi var.

Norwegian grammar – confusing, but still possible to understand

According to the dictionaries, Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Unfortunately, there is no easy way of learning this.

However, you may simplify this for yourself by turning feminine nouns into masculine. You can actually do that without breaking any official spelling rules of Bokmål. Some people even avoid feminine all together — they talk about common gender instead of masculine and feminine.

This may sound confusing, so I will give you an example. The dictionaries indicate that bok is a feminine word, meaning that you can say boka when you talk about “the book”. But the dictionary will also tell you that you can choose to use masculine instead: boken.

As you can see from this example, the definite article is put at the end of the word. In a way you say “book-the” — you make a new word out of it.

As explained above, the third category is neuter, which is a fixed category. The words that are neuter cannot be turned into masculine or feminine, nor can masculine or feminine words be turned into neuter. Neuter words can be recognized on the article: et hus (a house) – huset (the house). However, as mentioned above, you cannot easily know which article you should use – it needs to be learned by heart.

But as mantioned above, there is a lot of freedom of choice in Norwegian. This can be confusing, because it is a matter of finding your own style, and for foreigners, this is difficult to understand properly. But on the other hand, thanks to this freedom, you are probably less likely to make mistakes. And when you do make mistakes while talking (or writing), you will discover that the Norwegians are very forgiving in that respect. Nobody expects a foreigner to sound like a native speaker.

Then some more good news, at least if you don’t like reading grammar books. Norwegian doesn’t have a case system for its nouns; there is no accusative or dative or other cases, like you would have in German or Russian. 

Æ Ø Å:  the peculiar Norwegian vowels

Many people find it difficult to learn the Norwegian vowels properly. There are nine of them, and I explain all of them in this sound file

Have you been listening? Did you hear the difference? Of course, the difficulties will never be the same for every learner of Norwegian — it also depends on what is your own mother tongue. However, my experience is that many people find the y more challenging than the other vowels.

The length of the vowel also matters, and people can misunderstand you if you get it wrong. Here I give you some examples of pairs of words with respectively long and short vowels:

Long vowel	tak (roof)	hyle (scream)	ren (clean)
Short vowel	takk (thanks	hylle (shelf)	renn (race)

Are you able to hear the difference in pronunciation for every word pair? As you can see, it does make a difference, because the meaning changes when the vowel gets longer or shorter. However, my experience is that foreign students manage this very well after some time.

Norwegian also has some gliding vowels (diphthongs), like ei, au and øy. Many people find au and øy tricky, and you could say that they are typically Norwegian sounds. Check out this video to learn more

The spelling of Norwegian – write it the way you say it?

The Norwegian spelling has been reformed on several occasions. As a result of these reforms, most foreign words are written in a typically Norwegian way. The letter c is in most cases replaced by an s or a k. You also write ks instead of x, k instead of q and s instead of z.

Here are some examples:

sjåfør (driver), konjakk, sentrum, ekstra, sebra, sjampinjong, kakao

The same has happened to some English words. You write tøff (tough), kul (cool) and røff (rough).

That sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just write the way it’s said. But is everything that easy? No, not at all, because there are many exceptions. For instance, the vowels o and u can both be pronounced in different ways, as you can see here:

gul (yellow)	bunn (bottom)	funn (finding)
lukke (close)	lomme (pocket)	rope (scream)
sove (sleep)	tog (trein)	hoppe (jump)

Often, the pronunciation rules relate not only to specific letters but also to combinations of letters. However, my experience is that foreigners develop a feeling for how this works. The words that do not follow the main rules are usually used very frequently.

Do you want to learn more? I have written another post (including sound files and videos) about the Norwegian pronunciation rules.  

Tones and intonation – does it matter, and how?

Foreigners often get the impression that Norwegians always ask questions while they are talking. This is because the tone often rises at the end of a sentence. As you may have guessed, it cannot always be questions. In Norwegian, the sentence structure will usually tell you whether it is a question or not. And if not, you will in most cases be able to understand the meaning based on the context.

However, this does not mean that tones are not important in Norwegian. This can be seen in different ways, for instance in the so-called pitch accents or word accents. This phenomenon relates to words of two or more syllables.

Listen to these words in order to get an idea:

bønder (farmers)	loven (the law)	gjenta (repeat)
bønner (beans, prayers)	låven (the barn)	jenta (the girl)

It is possible that you hear little difference, or maybe no difference at all. Well, then I have some  good news again. You can achieve a good mastery of the Norwegian language, even if you never learn this. The Norwegians will understand you very well, as long as you pronounce the rest of the sentence more or less right. They don’t expect foreigners to speak without an accent. And after all, communication is always based on understanding the context.

Regional accents and dialects in Norway

Norwegian dialects are spoken on an everyday basis by all kinds of people, all around the country. In Norway, speaking a dialect is generally more accepted than in most other countries. The following video is a good example. Gabrielle chas been one of the most succesfull Norwegian singers in the last 10 years or so. Hear, you see hear in London, singing in her own Bergen dialect:

If Norwegians can speak the way they want, shouldn’t that also be the case for someone who learns the language? To some extent, that is the case. For instance, you can choose to pronounce the r either as a rolled r or as an r in your throat.  The melody of the language is also different in the different regions. However, not all kinds of pronunciation will be accepted. After all, people need to be able to understand you. 

For a foreigner, this regional variation can be very frustrating. Even if you think that you have learned to speak Norwegian well, you may have difficulties understanding the dialects of some areas. If you go to an area outside the Oslo region, you will often find that people constantly speak in dialect, in all kinds of situations.

Luckily, if you move to an area with a pronounced dialect, there is no need to learn to speak like the locals. However, you need to be able to get used to the dialect to understand it.  My experience is that foreigners manage that very well after some time. 

Conclusion: Is Norwegian easy or difficult? 

Learning a new language is challenging, whether it’s Norwegian, or any other language. However, if you go to Norway, you will see that there are many foreigners who speak Norwegian surprisingly well, also people who arrived there as adults. What they all have in common is that they made a serious effort to learn the language. Like with any language, learning Norwegian requires work and patience, at least if you want to reach a higher level. But in my opinion, it’s not a very difficult language. The Norwegian grammar can be mastered more easily than the grammar of many other languages. Besides, Norwegian has surprisingly many similarities to English.

Note: As also explained earlier, the examples in this article are all taken from Bokmål. Norway has had a lot of polemics concerning the language.  If you want to learn more, you can read my article about Bokmål and Nynorsk.

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