Å Lære Norsk (To Learn Norwegian)

Perhaps my previous writings haven't made it very clear, but I am here in Oslo to learn Norwegian. I take classes every week day from 815 to 1100. Class is conducted entirely in Norwegian; aside from another St. Olaf student who is a year younger than me, I am the youngest person in the class by five or six years. The class consists almost entirely of immigrants to Norway who require a knowledge of Norwegian for work or citizenship. In the twenty person class, we have represented Poland, Russia, Serbia, Hungary, the Ukraine, Pakistan, Germany, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Ecuador, and the United States. It's quite a mix and makes things quite the adventure, because everyone speaks Norwegian in the accent of their mother tongue.

Before I talk about the class itself, a short aside on Norwegian as a language. Norway actually has two official languages Bokmål, which I am learning, and Nynorsk. Bokmål, or "book language" is the dominant language in southern and eastern Norway, and is more closely related to Danish (and is sometimes referred to as Dano-Norwegian). It is also the language that the majority of published writing is done in. Nynorsk is very common in the west and the north. It is a language based upon the speech of the common folk, created around the turn of the century as an ode to Norwegian heritage when the country won its independence from Sweden. The situation is much more linguistically complicated than I have the space to go into, and is compounded by two things: one, the languages are fairly interchangeable in everyday speech. To non-Norwegian speakers, they sound fairly identical. Two, there is an enormous variation in the dialects spoken in different parts of Norway, so much so, that in fact some of them are fairly unintelligible (cue the old joke: Have you heard about the man who speaks a thousand languages? Every one of them is Norwegian). It's really a challenging, but supremely interesting, environment to learn a language in.

There are two primary goals in our class, the first being grammar and the second speaking. It's an odd situation, in that the majority of students in the class have been living in Norway for a year or more, and so speak the language much better than I do. However, few of them have taken it academically, and so most don't really know any grammar, which I guess is my strong point. It's sort of practicality versus philology. The class focuses mainly on grammar, although because it's entirely in Norwegian, we have a lot of opportunity to practice speaking. Outside of class we have workbook exercises to do, and I practice by listening to the Norwegian radio, speaking Norwegian out in Oslo whenever I can, and also by reading a comic by the name of Tommy and Tigern. It's known by a different name in the States, and perhaps you will recognize it by the cover:

Tommy and Tigern is convenient for learning Norwegian for a number of reasons, the first being that I've read them all so many times, but secondly, the sentences are short and simple, but written in a distinctly Norwegian style, so it's a good tool for picking up Norwegian diction, syntax and for lack of a better term, peculiarities. 

(On a side note, it's funny how they've had to change some of the wording to make the jokes translate, take this one for example, in which I think the original American cartoon had "Pittsburgh" as Hobbes answer:)

Calvin: I wonder where we end up when we die.
Hobbes: Bergen
Calvin: ...do you mean if we're bad or good?