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Children’s books and songs can be of great value when learning a foreign language – even if you’re a grown-up. 😉 Because phrases in children’s texts are normally short and to-the-point, you’ll understand them fast enough and easily gain the confidence (and curiosity) to learn more. Below follows a small breakdown of a classic Norwegian children’s poem.

Tomaten og løken (The tomato and the onion) was written by poet Inger Hagerup. Since it first appeared in 1974¹in the book Lille Persille, lots of Norwegian skolebarn (school children) have had to read it. You can hear it here, read with a clear and beautiful Sogn accent (Western Norway).

I’ll quote sections²In most of the world it’s legal to quote from poetry; the problem with shorter poems is, of course, that a single quote might be the entire text; to avoid that problem I split it up into several chunks of quote. with comments below:

Tomaten henger i solen

”The tomato is hanging in the sun”. Note that solen would rather be sola in more modern Norwegian. As you can maybe guess, henger simply means hangs (the -ing form would be hengende, but such forms are normally only used as a kind of adjective: de hengende hagene = the hanging gardens).

og tenker fornøyd som så: Stappfull av vitaminer

”Thinking contentedly like this: Brimful of vitamines”

Stappfull is stronger than just full! 🙂

gleder jeg store og små.

”I make big and small ones happy.”

The verb å glede means ”to please” or ”to make happy”.

Men løken ligger i kjelleren og grubler stumt på sin gåte:

”But the onion is lying in the cellar, mutely pondering its riddle:”

In Norwegian, adverbs from adjectives most often get the ending -t, that’s how stum (mute) becomes stumt (mutely).

Hva kan det være i veien med meg som bare

”What can be wrong with me who just”

i veien med literally means in the way with, but is a fixed expression about something being wrong with something.

får folk til å gråte?

”make people cry?”

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  in the book Lille Persille
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  In most of the world it’s legal to quote from poetry; the problem with shorter poems is, of course, that a single quote might be the entire text; to avoid that problem I split it up into several chunks of quote.