#29 "Erfaring" or "opplevelse"? The 2 nuances of "experience" in Norwegian. [vokabular]

One word captures the knowledge you carry forward while the other captures the moment you live through. With clear examples from work, language learning, and everyday life, we map the boundary between accumulated wisdom and immediate sensation so you can choose the right word and express yourself with nuance.

To make it actionable, I contrast near‑identical sentences and ask you to decide which word fits (best). Want to describe your history with Norwegians? Reach for "erfaring". Want to ask if a cinema trip was nice? That’s probably more an "opplevelse". 

If this breakdown is helpful, please follow the show, share it with a friend learning Norwegian (and write in the comment field the answers to my questions) :) If anything was unclear, feel free to let me know! 

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing Two Kinds Of Experience
• 0:29 Adfaring As Learned Knowledge
• 1:21 Oplevelse As Present-Moment Feeling
• 3:06 Jobs, Customers, And Accumulated Wisdom
• 3:54 Etymology And Verbs For Both Words
• 5:29 Practice Prompts And Usage Examples
• 7:16 Choosing The Right Word In Context

Transcript

Speaker: 0:13

Experience experience experience life is full of experiences. Livet at fullt av opplevelser og erfaring. In Norwegian we have two words for experience and the reason for that is that experience can be two different things. Imagine you're applying for a job, you want to write down what your experience is. In Norwegian that is at farting. At fighting. And if you think about it, when you write about your experience, you are writing about what you have learned, right? What what life has taught you or what different jobs have taught you. So e faring is all about what you have learned, things that you bring with you today. Whereas the word opplevelse is more about the present moment when you are in the moment of something, how it feels, if it's positive or negative, but the focus is not on what you learn from it afterwards. Example Y harmonsi po job. I have many good experiences at work. I have a lot of experience from my job. Notice that I use plural form for up level sid, so very often you consider it as something you can count, situations you have been in. Whereas erfaring is very often used in singular form because you consider it as something more abstract like knowledge, something that you have gained through many different situations. So you could say that erfaring is the accumulation of many opplevelse. It is what you take from different opplevelse. So imagine you work in a store, you have many nice customers that you talk to every single day. Every single day is one opplevelse in the moment, how it feels in the moment to talk to your clients. And then going through this, right, you see a pattern, you know how to talk to clients, you learn little by little how to talk to your clients, you gain wisdom, and that wisdom is called erfaring. It doesn't have to be theoretical wisdom, but more like you know how to deal with it. Now let's look closer at the two words. They both have uh their own verb, so the verb for erfaring is or ad far ad fad. It's taken from German, most probably. And the root verb is far far or far. Ofar means to travel. And if you think about it, when you gain experience it's like uh an adventure, it's a journey. Or erfare. Emphasis is on the second syllable or erfare to experience.

Speaker 1: 4:50

The second one is å oppleve you probably know å leve already, to live.

Speaker: 5:05

To live in the moment. Remember that. When you're living in the moment, you're just absorbing the feelings, you're just present. That's opleve. How do you experience this? Hvordan opplever du dette? How does this feel in the moment? How do you see it? Now I want to ask you a question. I have two sentences that are quite similar, but what is the difference? I would like you to tell me in the comment field. Det er viktig å oppleve mange ting. It's important to experience many things. Det er viktig å erfare mange ting. things. It's important to experience many things. What is the difference? Please tell me. And I wanted to add another thing. So someone who is experienced would would mean someone who has a lot of knowledge, right? So to say experienced you can only say it in one way in Norwegian. You would say erfaren and erfaren person. For me it sounds like somebody who has travelled a lot. The first sentence is what is your experience with Norwegians? Hva er din, blank, med nordmenn? So a second one is do you think going to the movies is a nice experience? Synes du at å gå på kino er en fin opplevelse? Do you think going to a movie theater is a good or nice experience? Okay how was that? I hope for you that listening to my podcast is a nice . jeg håper at å å høre på min podcast er en fin opplevelse. And speaking Norwegian gives you good experience: å snakke norsk gir deg god erfaring. Do you understand why I used opplevelse when talking about listening to my podcast and then I used the word erfaring when talking about practicing Norwegian? Let me know in the comment field.