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Easiest Scandinavian language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5443 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 49 of 74 28 October 2013 at 12:56am | IP Logged | |||||
I doubt that most Norwegians actually read books in Swedish and Danish, especially Swedish (due to differences in orthography). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5443 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 50 of 74 28 October 2013 at 1:08am | IP Logged | |||||
And I didn't have access to Danish or Swedish TV. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| horshod Pentaglot Groupie India Joined 5760 days ago 74 posts - 107 votes Speaks: Hindi, Marathi*, Bengali, Gujarati, English Studies: German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 51 of 74 28 October 2013 at 1:10am | IP Logged | |||||
I remember reading Hans Andersen's books translated into Marathi! Sorry, off-topic, but brought back memories from my childhood :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5324 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 52 of 74 28 October 2013 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, it is possible that I overestimate my fellow Norwegians. I have read Swedish since I was 8 years old, and I do not know of anyone who would have truoble with that either, but my friends may not be representative of Norwegians in general. I asked a few of my colleagues, and most of them said that it was not something they generally did, but it would not be a problem, and a couple of them said that given the choice they would have preferred English, since they are more used to reading that, or that it was about the same level of difficulty as reading Nynorsk. The latter answer gives me considerably food for thought, since all Norwegians are trained in both languages at school, and are supposedly able to write in both languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4089 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 53 of 74 28 October 2013 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
That reminds me of an experiment I participated in a couple of years ago. As a native Swedish speaker with no formal Danish training, I got to listen to Danish words and try to write down a Swedish translation while the researchers measured the activity in the different parts of my brain. They had already done this with Danish people listening to Swedish, so while they hadn't been able to study the data from the brain wave measurements they could say one thing: Danes were a lot better at understanding Swedish than Swedes were at understanding Danish. And the Swedes they were testing at this time all lived just across the strait from Copenhagen! They attributed this to how different Danish pronunciation, stress etc. Danes can imagine what letters Swedes are saying, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Which could explain why Swedes and Norwegians find each others' languages much easier than Danish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5310 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 54 of 74 28 October 2013 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, I was quite surprised when I found out by chance that Jo Nesbø's books were also available as Danish and Swedish translations. I had assumed that because of the often proclaimed Scandinavian intercomprehension publishers would bother to translate books by Scandinavian authors into the other two languages. I'm curious about bookshops in Scandinavia: Do they only carry books in the national language or are top 10 books in the other two languages readily available? Would a Norwegian or Swedish fan of Danish thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen patiently wait for the official Norwegian/Swedish versions of his latest thriller or would s/he most likely simply bite the bullet and get the Danish original? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4658 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 55 of 74 28 October 2013 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Children books are more readily to get a translation.
For example, Samlaget (a Norwegian publisher) translated works of Danish Lene Kaaberbøl into both Bokmål and Nynorsk. Not many books get a translation into both written styles of Norwegian (because of licensing rights, I guess), so it depends on a publishing company that buys translation rights (for example, Anna Gavalda's books got published/translated in Nynorsk). Edited by Medulin on 28 October 2013 at 4:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6899 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 74 28 October 2013 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know about Norwegian readers, but Swedes typically wait for the translation as long as it's fiction. Crime novels are popular, so there's a point in translations. Technical literature (which random bookshops don't normally carry anyway) is read in the original language (when I studied archaeology, we read about the Iron Age in Denmark, and when I studied Russian, we had a Danish textbook). 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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