How to speak Norwegian eller Hvordan snakker Norsk

Sadly, I can't define in one blog exactly how to speak Norwegian: 9 weeks in and we are still only able to speak in the present tense.

But these are some things I have gleaned from our first set of lessons with the marvellous Carl Henrik:

• English people are incapable of rolling their r's to the degree that Norwegian requires - they appear at the end of all verbs in the present tense, and can determine the meaning of many words as well, so all in all are fairly crucial. Carl Henrik spends half his time in class trying to get Ben and I to roll them sufficiently. So I spend my time walking around Oslo practising 'rrrrrrrr' and 'purrrrrr', sounding like a slightly demented lawnmower/motorbike/cat that is about to explode.  The longer I do it the more high-pitched I get so in the end my voice just kinda gives way.  

• It would be easier to speak this language if I was German. Their accent naturally fits - no fair! The two languages are not a million miles apart; if they get stuck, as one of them told us, they 'just think of what it would be in German and usually it's pretty right'. Again, no fair!  Fun in a class of five, where two of us are Brits and the rest German. Carl Henrik spends twice the time trying to get us to pronounce words absolutely perfectly as he does on the Germans.

• They have the masculine/feminine/neuter (en/ei/et) division of words, but no real rules to work out which words fall into each category. Nothing for it but to memorise them all on a case-by-case basis:
• et brev 
• et glass
• et eple 
• en hund 
• en dress (which is a suit!)
• en kjole (which is a dress)
• ei jakke (but this can also be en jakke - you can choose, which is very democratic)
• ei dame
• ei stekepanne    etc

• The definite article moves to the end of the noun in sentences when you are talking about a specific item:
• et bord = a table
• bordet = the table
• 'Glassene står på bordet'  = The glasses stand/are standing (one present-tense verb can express either sense) on the table 
• Jeg har et bord = I have a table

• They sometimes like to move the possessive pronouns (if I am remembering my grammar terms correctly - I may mean reflexive pronouns) to the end of the sentence, which can take some thinking about:
• 'Mellom klokken ti og klokka fire, skriver jeg på boken min' literally means 'Between 10 and 4 o'clock, write I on book my'

• You have to remember the 3 extra characters they have at the end of their alphabet, meaning their alphabet runs from A to Å:

1. Æ = short 'a' sound like in 'cat'
2. Å = sounds like 'aw' or the 'ou' at the beginning of ouch
3. Ø = sounds like ur

•  They tell the time in a way that is possibly harder than it needs to be: 

1. If you want to say 1.30 you have to think ahead to the next hour and say that it is halfway to 2: Klokken er halv to.
2. If you want to say any time between 16 and 29 minutes past the hour you have to work out how many minutes that is before you get halfway to the next hour.  So 5.18 = Den er tolv på halv seks  (12 minutes before halfway to 6)
3. To say that it is anywhere between 31 and 44 minutes past the hour, you work out how many minutes that is after half way to the next hour. 7.37 = Klokken er sju over halv åtte 
4. Just after you've grasped this, you then learn that they also use the 24-hour digital system which frankly seems simpler. They just say the relevant numbers, so 20.55 is 'klokken tjuer femtifem'

• One word can have two meanings, and it is the pitch/tone that determines which meaning applies. This is incredibly hard to do, maybe harder to try to explain and frankly I either usually can't hear the difference or just can't get it right! Again, this is something poor Carl Hendrik battles away with in lessons:
• Example: hander = hands OR happens
• Single tone hander = hands
• Double tone hander = happens  (you have to kind of start at one pitch, go up slightly, and then lower your pitch to one that is lower than where you started)

But for all this, I like learning Norwegian. There are words that are the same as the English (student), words where you can obviously see the connection (bok for book), and words that seem like a slightly more archaic version of English/other dialects (barn = child, so you can see the connection to the Scottish bairn). Some sentences are constructed in exactly the same way as well so that helps. I also like that our English-Norsk dictionary tells us how to say drive-by-shooting in Norsk; not sure how much that will come in handy, but it is skudd fra forbipasserende bil. 

Vi prøver lærer og håper vi har suksess!  Or should that be Vi prøver lærer og håper suksess vi har? Or maybe Vi prøver lærer og håper har vi suksess? Time for another class...