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Tag Archives: inversion

4 ways Norwegian differs from English Posted by on Aug 31, 2019

For speakers of English, learning Norwegian isn’t that hard: Both languages belong to the Germanic group and have a lot in common. (You can probably guess the meaning of words such as katt, melk, hus.) Still, there are some eye- (or rather ear!) popping differences: • Norwegian has grammatical genders. Every noun is either masculine…

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Where not to put IKKE? Posted by on Jul 31, 2017

Ikke (not) phrases are often called negative phrases – even if some of them are very positive in meaning: Vi vil ikke ha mer krig! (We don’t want any more war!) Sometimes, though, even the most positive negative sentence can drive a poor language-learner mad: Where do(n’t) I put ikke? Let’s take some simple summer…

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Mind your inversion Posted by on Jun 29, 2014

Norwegian grammar has a tiny detail that always gives away foreigners: Inversion. That basically means that in some situations you have to change the word order, and if you forget to do that in those situations, well, then you sound like a foreigner… 🙂 There’s inversion in English too. To make a phrase like “you…

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