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Which Scandinavian language to study?

 Language Learning Forum : Skandinavisk & Nordisk Post Reply
169 messages over 22 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 17 ... 21 22 Next >>
Emily96
Diglot
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Canada
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 Message 129 of 169
28 May 2013 at 12:51am | IP Logged 
Thanks, that helps. I definitely want to learn finnish since my grandma is finnish and i would love to speak to her in
her native language (even though she has perfect English). then i'm leaning towards norwegian because as many of
you have said it's the "middle man". or swedish because it is used so much in finland (so any trips there to visit
family could be used to practice both). sorry danish! =P
1 person has voted this message useful



1e4e6
Octoglot
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United Kingdom
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 Message 130 of 169
28 June 2013 at 10:16am | IP Logged 
I am not sure if this reason has been considered before, but in terms of usefulness,
Sweden offer dual citizenship and are part of the EU. Norway do not adhere to either of
those, Denmark do not allow dual citizenship. However, Finland adhere to both, but
Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are close to each other in the terms of language
similarity. So I was tihnking if one wanted close understand between languages, EU and
dual citizenship if they decide to immigrate there, Swedish seems to be the answer.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Chung
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 Message 131 of 169
09 August 2013 at 8:29pm | IP Logged 
This is a bit out of the blue for me but I'm curious if I should even bother with the following idea.

I have about a 50% chance of going to Denmark next month for a few days and am wondering if I should even bother getting a course such as TY Danish just to get survival-level understanding of the language after completing the first few units.I already have Beginner's Norwegian, and an English-Norwegian/Norwegian dictionary on my bookshelf to go with DLI Norwegian Headstart. Because I don't have a lot of time, I was thinking of trying to pick up some survival Norwegian so that I can at least read signs and understand basic instructions in Denmark. I am aware of Danish's phonological "strangeness" to other Scandinavians and am wondering as a foreigner with a potentially low ability in Norwegian, would spoken Danish be gobbledygook anyway since I'd lack the ability to fill in the blanks unlike those who are fluent in Norwegian and Swedish?
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montmorency
Diglot
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United Kingdom
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 Message 132 of 169
09 August 2013 at 9:09pm | IP Logged 
Chung wrote:
This is a bit out of the blue for me but I'm curious if I should even
bother with the following idea.

I have about a 50% chance of going to Denmark next month for a few days and am
wondering if I should even bother getting a course such as TY Danish just to get
survival-level understanding of the language after completing the first few units.I
already have Beginner's Norwegian, and an English-Norwegian/Norwegian dictionary on my
bookshelf to go with DLI Norwegian Headstart. Because I don't have a lot of time, I was
thinking of trying to pick up some survival Norwegian so that I can at least read signs
and understand basic instructions in Denmark. I am aware of Danish's phonological
"strangeness" to other Scandinavians and am wondering as a foreigner with a potentially
low ability in Norwegian, would spoken Danish be gobbledygook anyway since I'd lack the
ability to fill in the blanks unlike those who are fluent in Norwegian and Swedish?



Survival level Norwegian should enable you to read Danish signs, etc I think.

For the goggledegook, I wonder if this might help:

Copenhagencast

Podcasts are free. Optional transcripts are chargeable.

(And I've just noticed that Louise has put up some new podcasts. They seemed to have
gone into abeyance the last time I looked, which is some time last year.
1 person has voted this message useful



Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
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Norway
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 Message 133 of 169
09 August 2013 at 9:39pm | IP Logged 
NorwegianNYC wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Technically you are right that Bokmål is not a spoken
language.
In actual fact, Standard Eastern Norwegian (the dialect spoken in and around Oslo and in
the larger part of Eastern Norway) is pretty much identical to Bokmål. To be frank I
think there are political reasons for not admitting that fact. Nynorsk does not have a
spoken variant since it is a sort of West Norwegian Esperanto. To make it "fair" the
same is said about Bokmål. I would be very interested in hearing what actual differences
could be found between the spoken and the written variant. I am not aware of any after
having spoken it for the good part of 50 years.
No - no one speaks bokmål
nomore speaking nynorsk. The only place in Norway you come close to hearing
bokmål spoken is in certain areas of Finnmark. The current trend of considering bokmål
akin to the Oslo dialect is rather a consequence of bokmål becoming more alike bokmål
than a supposed "Dano-Norwegian" origin of the Oslo dialect.


Then please enlighten me when it comes to the differences. Which grammatical elements or vocabulary do
you find in Bokmål that you do not find in Standard Eastern Norwegian and vice versa? I will not change my
view simply because you say so. You will have to convince me by giving actual examples.

When what I hear around me every day, and what I speak myself every day contradicts the official and
politically correct view, then I would like to see actual arguments.

I fail to understand why even some Norwegians seem to be on a mission to make Norwegian appear to be a
complicated language to learn when it is not. Yes, we have two official languages, but you will rarely see
Nynorsk used unless you are in Western Norway, and by the time your Norwegian is so good that you can
even identify the differences, you will have no problems understanding it, particularly because it is getting
closer and closer to the more commonly used Bokmål. I have stopped trying to help my daughters with their
homework in Nynorsk, because a huge part of the variants I learned at school are now considered obsolete,
and have been replaced with words that are used in Bokmål.

And yes we have lots of dialects, but so do most other countries, Sweden and Denmark included. I have not
figured out whether learners of Norwegian and a few Norwegians find it prestigious to speak a language
which is considered complicated, but since most studies show that Norwegian is one of the easiest
languages to learn for an English speaker, I wish they would stop.

The only point I will concede, that actually may make it harder to practise your Norwegian, is that people
tend to swich to English if they hear you struggle. I think that is common all over Scandinavia though, and if
you explain that you would like to speak the local language, most people will be happy to do so.
4 persons have voted this message useful



tractor
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Norway
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 Message 134 of 169
10 August 2013 at 10:01am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Then please enlighten me when it comes to the differences. Which grammatical elements
or vocabulary do you find in Bokmål that you do not find in Standard Eastern Norwegian and vice versa? I will not
change my view simply because you say so. You will have to convince me by giving actual examples.

I'm not sure where one draws the line between Standard Eastern Norwegian and local dialects, but forms like gutta
(Bokmål: guttene), høl (BM: hull/hol), byne (BM: begynne), finni (BM: funnet) and skolen pronounced something like
skoorn are common in the area where Standard Eastern Norwegian is spoken. Unlike Standard Eastern Norwegian,
Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Riksmål can be read or spoken with any regional Norwegian accent or intonation.

Edited by tractor on 10 August 2013 at 10:09am

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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 135 of 169
10 August 2013 at 7:04pm | IP Logged 
Hmm... I hear features like swallowed endings, vowel shifts, soft/slurred consonants, alternative verb endings, retroflexed sounds etc. everyday in Swedish too, but I'm not saying Swedish is superdifficult, that there is a diglossic situation and so on.
1 person has voted this message useful



tractor
Tetraglot
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Norway
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 Message 136 of 169
11 August 2013 at 1:39am | IP Logged 
I don't think many people claim Norwegian is very difficult.

Edited by tractor on 11 August 2013 at 1:39am



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