Learning Norwegian

[ailuros]

using "they is good" wouldn't bother me in the least. the meaning is perfectly clear. he/she/it can go altogether. we've made it this far with identical second person forms. and sorry to those in the thread whose native language is not english for just barging in with an english thing.

[Hylander]

using "they is good" wouldn't bother me in the least.

This isn't what I mean by "singular they." "They" takes a plural verb. What I mean is using "they," "them" or "their" with a singular indefinite antecedent (someone, anyone, etc.) where the gender of the antecedent is not specified.

But this thread was much better when we were talking about the Scandinavian/Nordic languages.

[ailuros]

@hylander: my post wasn't aimed at you and i understand the difference. what you're noting is a kind of clumsiness (grammatically; but i'm not knocking its efficiency, even necessity) that comes about in english because the correct version would be even clumsier. my post was just a prediction poorly-worded as an opinion. my guess is that they with singular verbs is where we are headed.

agreed on topic theft. onwards, norwegians!

[jeidsath]

I had a second conversation yesterday. I'm getting better at fooling people about my Norwegian skills for a short time.

I found that my biggest problem with listening to Norwegian audiobooks was the speed. I turned it down to 0.75 yesterday and was able to hear all the connection words and understand a great deal more. This was not a problem for me with German. However, my German recording of the Hobbit is 11 hours, while the Norwegian clicks in at 9. I do have the feeling that Norwegians talk faster. But that could be lack of experience listening on my part.

I'm not having any problems due to the vocabulary of the Bible or the Hobbit transferring to conversation. For now at least the important words that I'm learning are mostly connectives and basic adjectives and pronouns and some important verbs. Picking up a few specific nouns for a conversation is the easy part (we chatted about sports -- my Norwegian friend is a big NBA fan.)

[Hylander]

my Norwegian friend is a big NBA fan.

One of the commercials before the Aftenposten video about the man/walrus friendship I linked to yesterday started with a clip from an NBA game in English, then eventually switched to Norwegian to promote a beverage unknown on this side of the Atlantic, which the players were drinking after the game. Another showed a naked man showering, and another seemed to be about domestic violence. Vold is "violence."

[MarkAntony198337]

ἀπόλλυται

[jeidsath]

@Mark I more or less do that, but I make the audiobook my first step rather than something to be added in later. With German, and Latin, and now Norwegian, it only felt frustrating and hopeless for a few days and then things started to pop into my head.

Another thing that I've been doing the last couple of days is glancing at an English translation while listening to the Norwegian. This is very difficult, because the temptation is to read the English and ignore the Norwegian. It takes me a lot of concentration to listen carefully to every syllable of the Norwegian, and only skim the English when I don't understand something. I couldn't do this during week one.

I think that a serious disadvantage of the written word is that I pronounce it like English in my own head until I've had a few hundred hours of listening. And I lose all of the emphasis and intonation and pauses that aren't written down on the page. That said, my understanding of written Norwegian is much higher at this point that my understanding of spoken Norwegian.

[jeidsath]

I'm listening to a lot of Nynorsk now. Apparently the situation between Nynorsk and Bokmål is very similar to that between Demotic Greek and Katharevousa. Bokmål is much closer to Danish than Nynorsk, but Nynorsk is closer to how most people talk.

Speaking remains very difficult. Norwegian has a lot of phonemes that are hard for me to wrap my tongue around, even as I begin to be able to pick them out in speech. And many letters of the written language are not pronounced. For example, from Markus 1:24, øydeleggja seems to bear only a slight relation to how it is pronounced. It sounds more like "oileg." I'm not used to words that are that much vowel.