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Which Nordic language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5219 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 1 of 12 06 September 2010 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would like to add in another language into my routine and have a hankering for the next to be one from one of the Scandinavian countries. My goal is to be able to talk to anyone, from any European country as defined in Wikipedia, in one of the home languages of their country at least at the B1 level. I will be at C2 in French and Spanish by then anyway for other good reasons and will have buffed up my Russian and Japanese too.
This target also gives me enough tongues to converse anywhere I am likely to travel to as well. Cuban Spanish, Jamaican dialect English anyone ? The question I would like to pose: Which language if any, for a non Nordic person who has basic fluency in German and some Old English, will facilitate learning all of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic. Ill get to Finnish when I look at the Finno-Ugric group. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 12 06 September 2010 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This question again... Learn Danish/Norwegian/Swedish and you'll be able to get by in whole Scandinavia (including the Faroe Islands and Iceland, I think), but you won't learn Faroese/Icelandic for free.
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| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5219 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 3 of 12 07 September 2010 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Jeff but I was looking more for advice on the relationships between the Nordic languages to point me at which one of the possible entry points would ease the linguistic learning path to all the others given my previous experience.
Anyhow, thanks for looking at my post and sorry to have brought up something again. Adrian Edited by maydayayday on 07 September 2010 at 12:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 12 07 September 2010 at 1:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, my bad. From a grammatical point of view, German (which you already speak) has a rich case system and so does Icelandic. You won't be chocked if you choose to study it. Learning Icelandic does probably ease the learning path for any of the other three (Da/No/Sw), but you won't "cover" Scandinavia by learning just Icelandic (just as case-intensive languages like Latin and Russian won't give you Portuguese/Spanish/French/Italian or Czech/Polish/Serbo-Croatian for free). It's far too different from any of the others.
According to this page, Norwegian is the easiest Scandinavian language for a native speaker of English, but skimming through that text, I can say that all the "easy" parts are more or less valid for Swedish too (and most likely Danish). Would you use the language to (be able to) converse or "just" to read? If the latter, you might want to learn Icelandic anyway, especially with Old English in mind. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 07 September 2010 at 11:23pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| exscribere Diglot Senior Member IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5279 days ago 104 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Danish Studies: Mandarin, French, Korean, Hindi | Message 5 of 12 07 September 2010 at 2:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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For what it's worth - I learned Danish 10 years ago when I lived there. I still speak it today, and I can converse with Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, each of them speaking in their native language, and me speaking in Danish. I hear from some that Swedes may have the hardest time understanding Danish, but I can't speak to that - I just know that in my experience, I've never had a problem with Danish as my "mode of speech".
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6229 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 6 of 12 07 September 2010 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Wow, that is a great article! It makes me want to start learning Norwegian!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mithridates Newbie Korea, South pagef30.com Joined 5676 days ago 21 posts - 36 votes | Message 7 of 12 08 September 2010 at 1:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just as interesting is this one I found in Norwegian last year:
http://www.pagef30.com/2009/03/norwegians-understand-other.h tml Norwegian is both 1) the Scandinavian language other Scandinavians understand the best, and 2) the language by which you can understand other Scandinavian languages the best. If you want to focus on one language in order to understand others the most, the best might be to live in a place like Fredrikstad for a year, then Ålesund for one more. Having two official types of Norwegian is a bother for many, but for someone who wants to learn it to understand other Scandinavian languages it could be a plus. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| psy88 Senior Member United States Joined 5591 days ago 469 posts - 882 votes Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French | Message 8 of 12 08 September 2010 at 2:41am | IP Logged | |||||
I second the praise. It is a bit premature, but perhaps I have found what my future target language will be. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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