#2 Uniquely simple and tricky - an introduction to Norwegian grammar & pronunciation [grammatikk] [uttale] [pronunciation]

Norwegian grammar appears intimidating at first glance but actually offers surprising simplicity in many areas compared to other languages. This episode provides essential knowledge about Norwegian grammar patterns and pronunciation features that will help beginners understand key language mechanics.

• Norwegian verb conjugation is straightforward with only two main past tenses and no changes based on subject
• Nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), but you can simplify by treating feminine nouns as masculine
• Definite articles ("the") attach to the end of nouns rather than appearing as separate words
• Word order follows strict rules with verbs (almost) always in second position (called inversion).
• Prepositions often don't translate directly from English. 
• Norwegian has three additional letters (Æ, Ø, Å) and several letters pronounced differently than in English
• Advanced pronunciation includes compound word stress patterns and tonal distinctions (tonems). 

All of these subjects will be treated more in detail in further episodes, stay tuned! 

Chapters

• 0:14 Introduction to Norwegian Language
• 0:45 Norwegian Grammar Simplicity
• 2:40 Nouns and Gender System
• 6:16 Adjectives and Inversion Rules
• 17:26 Preposition Challenges
• 19:34 Norwegian Pronunciation Guide
• 25:46 Tones and Compound Words
• 29:41 Episode Wrap-up

Transcript

Silje: 0:14

Hello guys, and welcome to today's episode where I'm going to talk a little bit about what is special about the Norwegian language when it comes to grammar and when it comes to pronunciation. My name is Silje, I'm a Norwegian teacher and here's today's puzzle piece. So, whether you're learning Norwegian already or you're about to get started, I hope this will enlighten you a bit, no matter where you are in your language learning journey. First of all, I wanted to say that, when it comes to grammar, it's quite easy.

Silje: 0:50

Norwegian doesn't conjugate in a very complicated way. You have two kinds of past tenses, two main kinds of past tenses, and that is it. And then you have present tense, which you use when you talk about what is happening right now or what is happening in general, whereas in English, for instance, you would separate the two. So you would say I'm eating if you're eating right now, or I eat every Friday, whereas in Norwegian you use one present tense. You would just say "jeg spiser In both cases.

Silje: 1:28

And same thing for past tense. If you talk about what you did in general or what you did at a certain moment in English, you would use two different verb tenses. So you would say, for instance, "I was eating at 8 o'clock when suddenly something happened. Or I ate every Friday, for instance, in Norwegian, there is only one way of saying that Jag spiste, so jag spiste would mean I was eating, or I ate or I did eat. So all of those three is covered with only one past tense.

Silje: 2:08

Now, same logic. If you're talking about something that has happened and you don't necessarily know when, you don't care when. For instance, if you say "I have eaten or I have been eating, in Norwegian there's only one way to say that, and it's jag har spist, I have eaten, I have been eating. It's the same thing. The only difference between infinitive and present tense is with or without an R. That's it.

Silje: 2:47

So if you want to say "I like to eat, for instance, the like needs an R Jeg liker å spise Whereas the spise doesn't take an R because that's infinitive and it doesn't matter which person is talking, it doesn't matter who you're describing, it will always be like that, no matter if it's I or you, or he or she or it, it's going to be the same conjugation. So it's super easy.

Silje: 3:21

We have four regular tenses, which means that there are four main patterns to follow when you conjugate a verb and, of course, a lot of irregular verbs, which you also have in English. What is good to know is that all the irregular verbs are very frequent. It will be the verbs that you use all the time, just like in English like to be, to be, was, is, has been. It's going to be the same in Norwegian. It's going to be very irregular. So if you don't learn that in the beginning, you're going to do a lot of mistakes because you're going to make those mistakes all the time. The good thing is that, since you use them all the time, you get a lot of repetition, so it's going to be easy to learn them and then later on, when you learn more verbs that are not so frequent, they will more likely be irregular verbs. So learn the rules for verb conjugation and you will be good to go.

Silje: 4:33

When it comes to nouns and when I say nouns I mean things, everything you can put a or the in front of in English. So, for instance in English. So, for instance, a baker or a microphone or a lamp that's nouns, what we call inflection, or like transformation, or you could also call it conjugation, if that's easier. So inflection of nouns is a little bit different than English, because we don't have the definite article the. We have something that looks like it, but it's not. If you want to know more about this, then look out for the episode about nouns. So when we want to say the something, no matter if it's the book or the books, if it's one or more we do not add a word, the equivalent of the, in front. Instead we will add the meaning, the, in the end of the word. So it would be like saying book the in one word and books the. So, for instance, maybe book is a bad example because it's irregular. I will choose another one cup. So if I want to say a cup, it's "en kopp, the cup is koppen, so en for this word would mean the. If I want to say cups, it's koppid, so er is the equivalent of s cups, and koppende enne is the equivalent of the plus s, so the and something you have more of. So that can be a little bit confusing, but you'll get used to it.

Silje: 6:28

Oh, and I forgot to mention nouns in Norwegian actually have three different genders feminine, masculine and neuter. And what that means basically is that, according to what kind of gender the word has no matter if it's a thing or a person or a living being that will determine the ending and the article you will get. So, for instance, cup that I mentioned earlier is masculine. So you would say "en kop a cup. So en is the masculine article. If I gave you a feminine word, the article would be ei, and if it was neuter, the article would be et. You can learn more about this in the episode about nouns.

Silje: 7:19

But what I want to tell you right now that can be super useful for you already now is that you don't have to use all three genders. If you want to make life easier for you, you can skip the feminine one. I know that sounds horrible. It doesn't sound that horrible for me because I am from Bergen, where we actually don't use feminine at all. I am from Bergen where we actually don't use feminine at all, but for someone who well feels that we should use both feminine and masculine, that might sound horrible, but it will really facilitate your life, because then having only masculine and neuter means that in most cases when you meet a new word, it's going to be masculine. So if you don't know. You can just guess that it's masculine and in most cases you will be right.

Silje: 8:18

And another reason why I suggest doing this is because Norwegians are not consistent with this, people who do use both masculine and feminine versions of nouns, they do not necessarily use it consistently. So, for instance, a person might use the word "seng, which is bed, and inflect that as a feminine word, but then another word, if I don't know, for instance girl, maybe they will inflect that as a masculine word, masculine noun, even though they can inflect it as a feminine one. So the use of feminine looks like it's about it is disappearing or being less and less used. And you can see that, especially when you read newspapers or official documents, that the feminine inflection is disappearing. And another thing even people who use like, let's say, I used bed the word bed, säng, which can be feminine I use that as a feminine noun. I will not necessarily be consistent when I do it might say min säng, my bed, using the masculine. Oh god, this gets too complicated. Basically, what I wanted to say is that they don't necessarily always inflect it as feminine. Yeah, let's stop there for now.

Silje: 10:16

Another thing to know, and this is maybe especially important if you have a mother tongue where you would inflect adjectives, and when I say adjectives I mean words that describe nouns or words that describe things, describe nouns or words that describe things. So, for instance, nice, good, cute, pleasant, red, green all of those words are adjectives. And, as you just learned, nouns have genders and adjectives would also change with the gender, but it only changes with the neuter one. It's going to be the same for masculine and feminine nouns, and what I wanted to say is that it changes differently than, for instance, in Latin languages where you would put an S, for instance, for plural, both on nouns and adjectives. But in Norwegian it's going to be a different ending for adjectives. So adjective endings are not the same as nouns, and in English there is no adjective ending. There is no change, no inflection whatsoever. So this is going to be new and this can be tricky because it will change according to the gender when you're talking about one thing or singular. And then when I talk about, when I describe things that are plural, it's going to be another ending again. So if I'm saying two big books or the big cups, for instance, it's going to have a different ending. And then, last thing about adjectives is that when you talk about something, that is definite. So if I'm saying the big book or the big cup, that's also going to have a specific ending. Apart from that, I would say that Norwegian grammar is quite easy. There are two more things that can be a little bit hard, but it never causes any problems when it comes to comprehension. Nobody will not understand you if you do this incorrectly in most cases.

Silje: 12:28

First thing is what we call inversion, so easily explained. Normally in a neutral sentence, you would have this specific order where you start with what we call the subject and then you have verb and object. For instance, I eat cake Subject. "I eat is verb, cake is object. So so the person or thing doing something is the subject, what is being done is the verb and what something is being done to is the object. That's like simple explanation. It's not always correct, but that's the easiest way to explain it.

Silje: 13:14

Um, now you see here, when I say "I eat, the verb eat is in the second place, and when I say second place, that doesn't mean necessarily the second word. That's important to remember, very important to remember. Second place only means second. What can I say? Second function. So you don't. You can't look at a sentence and analyze it word by word. It doesn't always work like that, because the subject is not necessarily just one word. If I say, for instance, my best friend, that would be three words. It's three words, but it's one function in the sentence who right? So if it was my best friend eats cake, it's still gonna be "my best friend first place, eats second place.

Silje: 14:12

So when that is said, very often, both in English and in Norwegian and probably all languages on the planet well, not all languages on the planet, many, many languages we would like we often put information that doesn't have to be in the beginning. We put it in the beginning just because we want to, for some reason. For instance, if you ask me, what are you doing tomorrow, I might start my sentence with "tomorrow, I will eat dinner with a friend. So I started my sentence with tomorrow instead of starting my sentence with a subject I, with tomorrow, instead of starting my sentence with a subject I, which means that in English the verb would now be third place. Oh my God! Right? Tomorrow, first place, I second place will third place.

Silje: 15:13

And when I say verb, I'm saying the first verb. So if I have a combination of verbs like will, eat, eat. I don't care too much about it, let's just look at will, the first one, okay. So I'm saying "danger because in Norwegian that's a big mistake. You can't. Well, it's not a big mistake, I'm just joking, but it's grammatically wrong to structure a sentence like that. So what happens in Norwegian is that in order to keep your verb on the second place is that you have to switch some places. So your subject will not come before the verb anymore, it will come after. So in Norwegian the sentence same, exact same sentence translated literally from Norwegian, would sound like this Tomorrow will I eat dinner with a friend? Okay, tomorrow will I. So you see what I did I switched places, will and I switched places. So the rule here is that whatever you put first in the sentence if it doesn't have to be there and there are many things you can put first in the sentence if it doesn't have to be there, well then your verb has to come right after that and then the subject after that again,

Silje: 16:46

Okay, that was much more information than what I was planning to say about that. I will make a distinct episode about that later, with a lot of examples, of I will make a distinct episode about that later, with a lot of examples, of course. And then the final thing I wanted to mention about grammar, which is maybe not really a grammar thing or sort of, partly. Because prepositions can really be a big problem for, not only for people learning Norwegian, but also Norwegians.

Silje: 17:26

I hear and I also struggle with prepositions. Sometimes I have to check which one is the best to use and very often you'll notice that we use them wrong. And very often you'll notice that we use them wrong. And "på the preposition på, which can be translated sometimes to at or on in English, is used quite often and very often in sentences in context, when we don't know which one to use. So that can be good to know. And the prepositions för and till, which are very similar to for and to in English, can sometimes be translated literally from English to Norwegian or the other way around, but very often not. When we're talking about physical location of things, where things are placed, it's quite straightforward to know which one to use, but as soon as we start talking about more abstract things it gets more complicated.

Silje: 18:38

When it comes to time prepositions, it's not going to be the same as in English. Just be prepared for that. You're going to get confused and you're going to make mistakes and say something else than what you want to say. So pay attention to time prepositions and then you'll notice that in Norwegian we have a lot of what we call preposition phrases, where you just have to learn which preposition to use. It's not always logical. Sometimes you can find logic, sometimes you can't. And we have also something called particle verbs, which basically are verbs where you add a particle, so a preposition or an adverb, and depending on which one you add, it's going to change the meaning of that verb, maybe to something similar or maybe to something completely different. I will make a separate episode on that as well.

Silje: 19:32

Now let's have a quick look on pronunciation. What do you need to know about Norwegian pronunciation? We have some sounds that are different from English. We have three additional letters in the alphabet: Æ, Ø and Å. Æ looks like an A plus an E put together, which is quite, which is a very good letter. Like. It is actually a mix of those two letters pronounced in Norwegian, not pronounced in English, so I will come back to that in a second. Ø is an O with a line through it and Å is an A with a circle on top of it.

Silje: 20:20

Some letters. You just have to get used to how they're pronounced, that they're not pronounced the same way as in English, for instance, A, which is A in English, so it's just A. And then E is pronounced ". Yeah and I, the letter I is pronounced e. J is pronounced ". O is pronounced ", which can be a bit tricky, but it is a sound that English speakers have. It's like W, but just prolonged. So, like in "what", O is O, u is pronounced [], which can be a bit tricky.

Silje: 21:13

I'll make an episode on that. W is pronounced like V. Actually, we do not really use that letter unless we yeah, only for names, for proper names and imported words. But no Norwegian, like no old Norwegian words, contain a W. Same thing goes with Z. We would pronounce it as an S, normal S, and it's also for imported words. And X as well. X would be pronounced like k and s together. Oh, yeah, and I forgot t The vowel Y, which is pronounced [Y", which is different from, which is a sound you don't. That doesn't exist in the english language. So the letters that you would need to learn to pronounce are, probably the R. There are many variations of R in Norwegian, but the most common one is the rolled one, which is rolled in a particular manner. It's R, r, r. Then you have the Y, which is pronounced [Y], which is like an I, where you don't smile. Yeah, that's tricky, I'll make a podcast episode on that.

Silje: 22:44

he you have the O, pronounced [U], the U pronounced [, and then three final letters Æ, , Å. And yeah, and also maybe diphthongs like ", au, aj, ej. But when you master the vowels, then going from one vowel to two vowels combined in a diphthong, then that shouldn't be too big of a problem. Have I forgotten anything? A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j or ", k, l, m, n, o, p, q, oh yeah, q also Q, the Q, the English Q. We also only have that for imported words like IQ, iq, and we pronounce it like "[k<a href="https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Near-close_near-front_compressed_vowel" class="mw-redirect" title="Near-close near-front compressed vowel" style="background: none rgb(248, 249, 250); border-radius: 2px; overflow-wrap: break-word; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 19. 2px; text-align: center; white-space-collapse: collapse; text-decoration: none ! important;">ʉ</a>],, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, a, o, o. Yeah, that's it, we got it. Now Another thing about pronunciation stress.

Silje: 24:04

Where do you put the stress? Where do you put the emphasis in a word In general, or the easiest way to explain it is that in general, for Norwegian words it's going to be for Norwegian and German. For Norwegian words it's going to be yeah, for Norwegian and German. Most German words that are coming from Old German or Northern German will have the emphasis in the beginning, the first syllable Not always, but sometimes it's going to be the second, but in most cases the first one and then for the words that do not have the emphasis on the first or second syllable, then it's probably going to be imported from French. So we have a lot of French words, many thousand French words that are very common to use in everyday speech and daily conversations are from French, and in French they put the emphasis very often in the end of the sentence, and many of them are similar to English, which means that you might want to put the emphasis where you would put it in English, but it's going to be different and that's the way you'll see that this word has not been taken from English, like "restaurant, which means restaurant in English, or département or department. You see, it's very similar to English, but emphasis is in the end instead of in the beginning of the word.

Silje: 25:39

And since you've listened so far, I'm going to give you a small bonus which might discourage you a bit. No, I'm just kidding. I'm going to tell you the reason why it is very hard to get a perfect Norwegian pronunciation, even though you have something we would call "språkøre or language ear, or actually there are two things, two things that make it difficult for foreigners to learn to have a perfect Norwegian pronunciation. First one is compound words. We love to put words together and make what we call compound words. It can be verbs or nouns or adjectives, any kind of word. You'll see that a lot, and when you combine two words together, the pronunciation is different than when they are separate, because you put your main stress in the very beginning of your word and then you will have what we call extra small stress on the other words in that compound. So that's one thing. And the last thing, which is really a hard thing to master and it's okay if you never master it, but if you're a language nerd and you really want to master it, then that's going to be like what we call the dot over the I, the letter I or the final touch to like really have a perfect pronunciation. I'm not going to encourage you to do that, because there's no point to do it.

Silje: 27:32

There are even some dialects that don't really have this, and in most cases it's not going to create any problems when it comes to comprehension. So, but I'm gonna tell you what it is. It's called tonems or tones. Norwegian is not really a tone language, but for some words we do have different tones that will differentiate two words that look exactly the same. The only thing that separates them will be the tone. Most of the time, we use the tone called tonem 1, and that is what foreigners master, because that's what they hear most of the time. And when it comes to tonem two, that's where they start to struggle a little bit, because they don't hear it that often and maybe they don't really pay attention to it because it's it's very subtle. I'm going to give you an example of this, and then I will probably make an episode on this, but not right now, it's not my priority. So are is tone one Bönner Bönner Beans is tonem two Bönner Bönner. So essentially, tonem one goes a little bit down before it goes up quite high, whereas tonem two goes deeper down and then it doesn't go that high up in the end. Okay, that was a lot. I didn't plan to make such a long episode.

Silje: 29:39

It was going to be five minutes. I'm sorry, and then again, I'm not sorry because you're welcome. I hope this was useful for you and if this was too much grammar vocabulary, then hopefully the smaller episodes will be easier to grasp, because since I didn't want to spend too much time on this, I used a little bit more grammar words than I wanted to use. But in the smaller episodes, on smaller themes, I'm gonna explain it without necessarily using too many grammar words. So these were the essential things that I wanted to tell you about grammar and pronunciation. There were some things that I had to leave out because it would just take too much time, but these are the things I found the most important to talk about. I hope it will help you on your language journey and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Take care! Ta vare på deg! Vi høres! Bye!