My Little Norway – Flower Show Series
A large red garden flower photographed in Tromsø.

Innledning

Velkommen til norskleksjon 132! You may have noticed that all instructions are in Norwegian now – but if you have come this far you are certainly good enough to handle it ;D.  In this lesson  you will see we are getting into the good stuff now.  Your learning of dialogues, verbs, and sentence structure from previous lessons will be solidified and you will be able to use all your Norwegian knowledge – but only if you push yourself to ‘go the extra mile’.  Past tense and perfect tense will set you up for the rest of your Norwegian learning.  It will certainly widen your vocab but also get you to a very good beginner stage of understanding Norwegian.  You will notice we are using some dialogues from past lessons – the familiarity will help you learn quicker.  We actually have a few more things to learn before we move onto Nivå 2 – so I might take a couple of days more to help you practise all that you have learnt before we more onto the next level (which will also include an end of Nivå 1 test).

About the ‘gloser’ – remember that if you cannot find a word in the current ‘gloser’ it means we have covered it before.  So hopefully you have been creating your own ‘gloser’ as we go, with a spreadsheet program for easy access and find.

But for now – have fun getting into the ‘real’ Norwegian!

Norwegian Lesson 132

Learn Norwegian Podcast! – Greetings and Phrases
In this podcast we go over some special sounds in Norwegian, a little history and social norms in using the common Norwegian greetings and phrases.  This podcast is taken from the Learn Norwegian sheet: Greetings and Phrases.  It is really helpful to have this sheet with you when listening to this podcast so you can see the words we are talking about.

NOTE: To download our podcasts you will need to subscribe via email or RSS.  Cheers!

  [Read more...]

This week on NRK2 (the state public channel in Norway) Wimbledon has been on every night.  This might seem normal to any tennis playing country but in Norway there aren’t any tennis courts! No short grass fields with painted lines, no red clay to colour the landscape.  Why are there no tennis courts in Norway?  Ah-ha – I guess ice and snow isn’t good for bouncing balls and short sprints.  Imagine lobbing the ball over the net to only have it drop two feet beneath the white snowy floor!

It seems like Norway’s only claim to fame in tennis was Molla Mallory in 1923 (a Norwegian born American tennis player).  Back then tennis was called ‘jeu de paume’ (the game of the palm) – a little wilder than the modern tea-sport with balls bouncing against walls and roofs apart from hitting in over the net.  Molly was ranked 2nd in the world in 1921 and 1922.  Unfortunately she was defeated in the 1923 U.S. Women’s singles championship by the 18 year old Helen Wills.

Even though tennis isn’t Norway’s most popular playing sport (it is said that ten pin bowling has more popularity!) Norway still has a fairly decent tennis organisation: Norges tennisforbund.  Maybe if they introduce downhill ski-tennis the game might pick up?  Two skiers pelting down the track on either side of a net hitting the ball in front of each other – it could work… it’s got the pace, the agility and the stackability all in one!

However, there must be some indoor tennis courts around somewhere due to the obvious popularity of Wimbledon on TV (but I have yet to find one).  Actually, now that I think about it, in all the places I have visited and lived, I have only seen one outdoor court in Oslo at Frognerparken near the statue park (but I’ve never seen anyone playing on it!)

My Little Norway – Flower Show Series
A pink garden flower with thick stem photographed in Tromsø.

My Little Norway – Flower Show Series
A white and purple garden flower photographed in Tromsø.

Name Days are a calendar of names. These calendars generally have two names associated to each day of the year. Name Day calendars first appeared in Medieval times, created by the Catholic Church to replace the pagan celebration of birthdays. Back then the days of the year were named after Catholic Saints and Martyrs known as ‘Saint feast days’. Today, Name Days are still recognised in many countries throughout the world that have had a strong Catholic influence in its history.

(Click on the image to enlarge.)

Above is a copy of a Swedish almanac (1712). On the top left you can see the word “Februarius” – February, and the calendar lists 30 days.  In the next column is the name given to the day.  On the 14th of Feburary you can see ‘Valentin’.  However, on day 30 the word ‘added’ is written next to.  The next column has depictions of animals from the Greek Zodiac Horoscope – each name has a different animal symbol. [Read more...]

My Little Norway – Flower Show Series
A red and yellow orchid known as Orkide in Norway.  Photographed in Tromsø.

Innledning

Velkommen til norskleksjon 131! In this lesson we are learning lots of new past tense and perfect tense words.  We also learn how to say what we ‘think’ and ‘believe’.

The next week will mainly concentrate on word development so make sure you keep your tables up to date – this will be an invaluable resource for you.

Enjoy the lesson.

Norwegian Lesson 131

Learn Norwegian Podcast! – Greetings and Phrases
In this podcast we go over some special sounds in Norwegian, a little history and social norms in using the common Norwegian greetings and phrases.  This podcast is taken from the Learn Norwegian sheet: Greetings and Phrases.  It is really helpful to have this sheet with you when listening to this podcast so you can see the words we are talking about.

NOTE: To download our podcasts you will need to subscribe via email or RSS.  Cheers!

 
[Read more...]

Innledning

Velkommen til norskleksjon 130! One of the hard things I find when learning to speak Norwegian is that I don’t know what gender I’m using until I get to the noun and then the beginning of my sentence is usually wrong.  It means that I have to think of the gender of the noun first before I can construct the sentence to say.  Meanwhile my talking companion is waiting for all this mental process to happen before they can get a reply from me.  This can be very frustrating and it often makes me want to stop speaking Norwegian because if I just say it in English everything happens much quicker.  I think this is one of the reasons I’m a better writer and reader of Norwegian rather than speaker and listener because I can do it at my own pace without someone waiting for me.  But how long does it really take you to learn Norwegian?  Don’t believe those who tell you they learnt Norwegian (or know somebody who learnt Norwegian) in just six months – unless they are Swedish or German, that is.  As far as I’ve seen it takes about 8 years of constantly living the language to be almost good as a Norwegian.

Becoming familiar with Norwegian is the key to learning more.  The more you get used to the look of the words, the sound of the words and how to say them, the more you can learn.  It took me about a year before I felt comfortable with the way things looked.  Now I’m used to seeing words with no (English) vowels and I don’t get so chocked up when I see ‘øy’ when reading.  The longer you keep at it the better you will be – but it sure helps a hec of a lot to be consistent with your learning.

So – let me now just burst your Norwegian learning mind by introducing verb tenses!  They are freaky and require a lot of effort but I guess in the end they are worth it.  (However, I find I don’t need to speak in past tense in daily life unless I want to tell a story.)  But anyways, see this lesson as an adventure.  Don’t worry, I’ll slowly ease you into the deep end so you will know how to swim before your head goes under ;D

Cheers!

Norwegian Lesson 130

Learn Norwegian Podcast! – Hello & Good-Bye

In this section we have a new feature to our Norwegian Lessons – a Learn Norwegian Podcast.  This is our first edition and we will be covering all the basics from our Learn Norwegian page on the blog.  This is our practise ground to hone and refine our podcasts.  Then we will be moving onto making podcasts to specifically balance the Norwegian Lesson series.

We’d like to thank George from Cyprus for giving us some good tips and ideas.  We hope we have done you proud ;D.

NOTE: To download our podcasts you will need to subscribe via email or RSS.  Cheers!

Number one thing to do from the beginning of this lesson is to keep a verb tense table.  Create one in a word or spreadsheet doc which can expand and be added to as you go – like this: [Read more...]

My Little Norway – Flower Show Series
A yellow petal garden flower photographed in Tromsø.