Norwegian Language Blog

Now that jul is over and the end of 201o is very near, I find myself thinking about things that have happened this past year.  You can never have too much practice with the past tense when you are learning a new language.  If you are like me, learning verb tenses is not your favorite part of learning a foreign language.  There is always a lot of memorization involved and Norwegian is no exception.  There are weak verbs and there are strong verbs and unfortunately, there really isn’t any rhyme or reason as to which verbs are weak and which are strong.  There are far fewer strong verbs, so it’s best to memorize those and learn the easily recognizable pattern that the weak verbs follow.  There are 4 classes of weak verbs and they each have a different suffix that is added on to the root of the verb.

The following is a chart that I used when I studied Norwegian at St. Olaf College of the 4 classes of weak verbs.  If you memorize what the four classes look like and how they are treated in the past tense, you will be good to go.  I will write a separate post on the Present Perfect verb tense, so for now, concentrate on the past tense.

As I said, there is no rhyme or reason in the way verbs are categorized, but I do find that after you have learned them and used them for a while, you realize that if some of them had the suffix of another category, the word would sound funny.  Does anyone else know what I’m talking about?  For example, the 4th class (bo, kle…) would sound just wrong if they received the suffix “et.”  The same goes for the verb å snakke-it would sound really strange if it was “snakkte” in the past tense.  In my opinion, Norwegian grammar in general is fairly simple and straightforward compared to many other languages.  That being said, it takes time to learn the classes of weak verbs and memorizing the strong verbs and their different forms.

Study this chart and really try to understand it and you will be glad you took the time to do it.  Being able to make sense expressing yourself in a different language is far easier if you know verbs and their different tenses.  The subject and object of course are very important, but most important is being able to describe the actions of the subjects and objects.

Happy studying!  Next wil be strong verbs in the past tense:)

I find the word hos quite interesting.  Until recently I didn´t know it had so many betydninger( meanings).  The other day a Norwegian was asking me if I thought Norwegian was a hard language to learn.  I explained that although French and Spanish are the only other languages of which I have some comprehension, I have found Norwegian to be quite an easy language to learn.  We discussed the simplicity of Norwegian grammar and verb conjugation (or lack thereof rather) and the size of the Norwegian vocabulary: very small.  He said that he didn´t think English was very hard to learn, but the English vocabulary is so much larger.  He said, ´I don´t understand why you need so many different words.  We have much fewer words.  Many words have multiple betydninger, but as long as you can follow the context, it´s no problem.´ He is absolutely right-we certainly don´t need so many words to express ourselves.

Back to hos, a word that has many betydninger.  It can mean at, from, of, with, by, and among.   I can´t think of a word in English that has so many betydninger .  It works so well though, because everyone understands which meaning hos has in a sentence based on what else is said.  Now that you know the different betydninger of the word hos, I´ll show you examples of the word in sentences, all of which have slightly different betydninger.

Hvordan står det til hos dem? How is it going with them?

Skal du sove hos Børge i kveld? Are you going to sleep at Børge´s tonight?

Jeg brukte masse penger hos dyrelegen i år. I spent a lot of money at the vet this year.

Boka ligger inne hos meg. The book is in my room.

Tålmodighet er et godt egenskap hos henne. Patience is a good quality of her´s.

Wibeke søker råd hos psykolog. Wibeke seeks advice from a psychologist.

Jeg skal spise middag hos Tove i kveld.  I´m going to eat dinner at Tove´s tonight.

Hos, it´s a great word!  Simple but has so many betydninger!

It is my personal belief that the Norwegian language is more logical than English-it just makes more sense to me.  I’ve said before that I had a native Norwegian professor in college who said that the Norwegian language is barbaric, it’s simple.  She is absolutely right.  I would like to share a list of words with you that I think exemplify this opinion.

-flyplass (airport) literally translates to “plane place”

-tannlege (dentist) literally translates to “tooth doctor”

-skrivebord (desk) literally translates to “write table”

-

(improve) literally translates to “for better”

-sommerfugl (butterly) literally translates to “summer bird”–ok this one isn’t so obvious, but “summer bird” makes more sense than “butterfly”

-høsttakkfest (Thanksgiving) literally translates to “fall thanks fest”

-lovbrudd (offense) literally translates to “law break”

-lastebil (truck) literally translates to “load car”

-frokostblanding (cereal) literally translates to “breakfast mixture”

-avreise (departure) literally translates to “off travel” or “from travel”

-helligdag (holiday) means “holy day,” and while all holidays aren’t religious, it makes more sense to me to combine two actual words  (holy and day)

-ordbok (dictionary) literally translates to “word book”

-datamaskin (computer) literally translates to “data machine” (as is fairly obvious…)

-gressklipper (lawn mower) literally translates to “grass cutter.”  Why create more words, such as mow?  And you don’t really cut the whole lawn, just the grass.

-førskole (nursery school) literally translates to “before school”

-medhjelper (assistant) literally translates to “with helper”

-tresko (clog) literally translates to “wooden shoe”

-nålevende (contemporary) literally translates to “now living”

-etterkommer (descendant) literally translates to “after comer”

What do you think?  It sure seems like we have created a lot more words than we really need.  How come we didn’t combine more words to form compound words like Norwegian?