The Easiest Things About Learning Norwegian

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Despite the mutual intelligibility between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, Norwegian is considered the easiest of all the Scandinavian languages to learn for English speakers. We’re here to help you begin your language journey by highlighting some of the easiest things about learning Norwegian.

It’s a Germanic language:

Norwegian belongs to the Germanic language family. What does this mean for you? During your studies, you’ll conveniently find cognates between Norwegian and English vocabulary. For example, Velkommen til London. Bet you can figure out what that means! Read it slowly and out loud and you’ll quickly realize the phrase says: “Welcome to London!”

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Pronunciation is straight-forward:

The Norwegian alphabet is the same as the English one, except for three additional letters: æ, ø and å. In addition to using the same alphabet, you’ll come to realize that each letter is pronounced similarly as well, with the exception of ‘j’ which is pronounced like ‘y’; ‘e’ which should sound more like the vowel of ‘egg’; and ‘i’ which is the sound elicited by the double vowels in ‘bee’.

Tense Formations are easy:

Forming tenses in Norwegian is one of the easiest aspects of the language. Although we won’t give you a demonstration now you can rest assured that conjugating verbs will be a piece of cake --even more so than English conjugations!

Words follow a similar order:

Although the word order does vary slightly from English, most Norwegian word order is very similar to our own. To give you an example, Jeg kan snakke fransk means “I can speak French”. This is a very helpful step when you’re already juggling parts of a language in an effort to learn.

Word Use is economical:

What do we mean? Well, spoken Norwegian isn’t particularly wordy. Whereas in English we use an elaborate system of adjectives to describe things, Norwegian is pretty straight to the point. To give an example: hæ can be used for a variety of things, from a simple “huh?” to “I didn’t understand what you just said, can you repeat?” Similarly, Nei, men! can literally mean “no, but...” as if starting a protest, but it can also be used to say “It’s you! Good to see you!”

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Who says Norwegian is difficult to learn? You can see for yourself that its level of difficulty is no different from any other European language. In fact, because of the cognates, word order and verb conjugations, it is probably one of the easiest for English speakers to pick up. Are you interested? Of course you are. Well in that case, contact us to find out what language courses we have available for you!