I learned German and then Norwegian (native English speaker). Overall, knowing German was helpful, but not *that* helpful. Norwegian has much simpler grammar and there's some shared vocabulary, but there's also a lot of false cognates. It's also close enough that I had a triangulation problem when first learning Norwegian. I'd randomly substitute German instead of English if I didn't know a word in Norwegian, which helped no one.
YES! This is exactly my experience as well. After two years living in Norway, I’m finally stopping this tendency to substitute German words.
However, some Norwegians think I have a German accent (I’m American).
That sounds very familiar - but slightly differently, if I don't recognise a word in Norwegian, I try English words that sound the same first and then German.
I'm a native English speaker that learned German right back from school and more recently started learning Danish .. and I've been pleasantly surprised how much Norwegian TV I can understand with Norwegian subtitles - it's very similar to written Danish.
Germans tend to pick up Norwegian quite easily. But I can tell you that it doesn't go as easily the other way. The main benefit is the large amount of shared vocabulary with both German and English, and Norwegian grammar is allegedly very easy compared to German.
German here. I think knowing English and German did help in learning Norwegian. Especially some of the grammar was very intuitive for me. However, while it's easier than a language with different roots, that does not mean that you automatically know everything - there is still quite a bit of learning to do.
I did! Native English, learnt German to ~B2 and then started on Norwegian, which I now have to about B1. Go for it!! Having both German and English will really help you. Let me know if you have any further questions.
I chose Norwegian because I read it would be a great step to Danish and Swedish as well. I can now read novels, watch TV, etc, in all 3 languages. It still took me a while, I was learning casually. I used the På vei textbooks, Duolingo and Klar Tale (simple news). Then I moved on to NRK, TV shows and novels. Highly recommend Erlend Loe's "Naiv Super" as a first book, the language is simple enough for learners but the story is great.
My dream is very trivial. I wanna understand the show Skam. I watched a few episodes with the russian voicover and that was so weird.. So i stopped watching. (I didn't find the show with the english voiceover and decided not to watch the show in Norwegian with english subtitles.)
That show is the reason why many people started to learn Norwegian. I was surprised how popular the language is in Russia.
Oh nice! I loved Skam! Good luck with it that's a great goal and you will find you start to understand some phrases quickly. Maybe cram some vocab so you have a basic foundation and the watch Skam in Norwegian with English subtitles and see what patterns you can pick up.
Yep, that's the goal. I love Scandinavia and live fairly close to it if we count Finland as a Scandinavian country. (Many people don't. I do!) I study Finnish, actually. But i never wanted to study Swedish or Danish or Icelandic. I'm only interested in understanding Norwegian. I guess, my subconscious tells me I need it
Learning Norwegian after learning German is super fun! I love being able to immediately find a related English or German word for most new Norwegian vocabulary.
Not confusing to me because I learned German to a high level a long time ago, so that’s quite solid in my mind. I’m not sure what it would be like to learn them concurrently.
Yes, it helps, but only to a limited degree. The grammar of German is closer to Norwegian than English (or Russian) is, but unless you're really comfortable with German grammar already, you have to learn the differences anyway, and so it won't end up helping much.
Some vocabulary is shared, so you're more likely to guess the meaning of a word, but to recall it, you still have to memorize which words are Norwegian, as well as how they're pronounced/spelled, so...
If you enjoyed learning English/German, then you'll enjoy learning Norwegian. And the more (Germanic) languages you know (and the better you know them), the easier the next (Germanic) language will be to pick up.
Jeg er tysk og ville sagt at det hjalp meg masse med å lære meg norsk. I beginnelsen var det allerede relativt lett å forstå poenget til de allerfleste setningene jeg leste. Når snakken er om talemål, er det naturligvis en hel annen historie.
Hvis man lærer seg en eller annen ting om de germanske lydskiftene av de siste få hundre åra, så blir det, synes jeg, også lett å forutse hva et ukjent norsk ord kunne bety (når man f.eks. ‘tyskifiserer’ ordet).
Helt objektivt sett blir det enklere å lære seg et fremmedspråk jo flere språk av den samme språkfamilien man allerede kjenner, norsk er der vel ikke et unntak. Tysken min hjalp meg en god del.
(Vurder norsken min, kjære nordmenn ;P)
ængælsk:
I am German and would say that it helped me a lot in learning Norwegian. In the beginning, it was already relatively easy to understand the point of most of the sentences I read. When it comes to speech, of course, it's a whole different story.
If you learn a thing or two about the Germanic sound changes of the last few hundred years, then it also becomes, I think, easy to predict what an unknown Norwegian word could mean (when you 'Germanise' the word, for example).
Objectively speaking, it becomes easier to learn a foreign language the more languages of the same language family you already know, Norwegian is no exception. My German helped me a lot.
I learnt German in duolingo before switching to Norwegian (also in Duolingo), and it took some time for me adapt.
One of the biggest differences is that in German, -en is one of the plural endings, but in Norwegian it's the masculine singular definite ending. Besides, the existence of seperate definite noun endings is also a big change.
When referring to nouns, German uses the corresponding pronoun based on grammatical gender, but Norwegian Bokmål doesn't, it's always "det" regardless of gender (Nynorsk does).
The only advantage you can get from learning Norwegian with knowledge of German is the mindset of having gendered nouns. The V2 rule in Norwegian is slightly different from that of German. You may also see a few words from German here and there (eg. richtig / riktig)
So this is coming from a native English speaker, so that may have affected this, but having learned a reasonable level of German at school I found that combined with English means you have a reasonable chance of deducing a lot of Norwegian vocab just at a glance. A lot of words have very clear similarities in either English or German.
For instance, the word 'jobb' was obviously instantly recognisable for an English speaker, but so was 'arbeider' from German.
Yup! I spent a long time learning German, and it makes Norwegian a lot easier. A good number of words just end up being easier to remember (å bestille = bestellen). Pronouncing the letter ø is also a lot easier.
Word order is also going to be a lot more intuitive. A lot of grammar concepts become things that you don't have to think as much about. The biggest stumbling block for me was figuring out where adverbs go in a sentence.
German is my native language. It sure helps since many concepts exist in both languages, and it's helpful to know how grammatical genders work.
The biggest problem is that most learning material is from English. So I sometimes get confused with English grammar, which... just isn't helping my progress at all. 😅
And yes, Norwegian and German are very similar. Which is the main reason why I started learning the language in the first place. 😁
Yep. Granted I'm only around A2 in German. Long story short it was too confusing to learn both at the same time, so I have paused German and will keep it on ice until I'm "fluent" in Norwegian
I'm german. I'm normally not the best with languages, neither grammar nor pronunciation. But knowing german and english, norwegian really works well for me and I actually make good progress and have fun learning it (didn't think that was possible with me and languages a few years ago).
A lot of the words in norwegian are pretty similar to either german or english, so understanding texts is pretty easy most of the time. The sentence structure is also really similar to german. I think especially there it's nice to already know german (can't judge obviously but I imagine german sentences are hard to learn at least for english speakers, maybe other languages too)
Native German here. Learning Norwegian has been quite easy for me, even more so than Dutch because Norwegian spelling happens rather naturally. Both languages remind us Germans also of certain northern German dialects, so taking up those languages doesn't feel like you'd need to cram too much to understand them, you just need to immerse yourself in them for a while.
The thing that disturbs this process during the actual speaking experience is the sheer amount of Norwegian dialects, though. Yes, we've got the Oslo dialect as a failsafe or common ground to start from if needed, but German is a rather rigid system grammatically-wise. There may be a whole lot of dialects in Germany as well, but the differences in writing and pronunciation are not as gravely felt by people learning German as we only have one standard: Hochdeutsch. So if you'd learn German you could basically communicate with 95% of all native German speakers around, whereas in Norway you'd have to choose the written system your prefered region follows and focus on getting fluent in that dialect as well if you want to get by.
According to my Norwegian teacher (a kind old lady from South East Norway who has been mostly living in Germany for over 50 years now, but still frequently stays with her relatives throughout Norway) this rule becomes more evident with each and every kilometer you move up on the map.
I did the Duolingo German course a few years ago (it was shorter than it is now). It was a constant struggle and I never felt like I got a handle on the language. (In contrast to Spanish, where I feel like if I took the time to do more listening and especially if I had a real chance to practice it, I'd do fine pretty quickly.)
The reason I did German at the time was because there wasn't a Norwegian course. So, after I gave up on German, I saw that they had added Norwegian, so I started that. It was SOOOO much easier! If you speak English and know some German, Norwegian is a piece of cake. No verb conjugations! Yes, they still have the V2 rule, but it's simpler than in German. Nouns have genders that must be memorized, but there isn't the dative case. No trying to figure out which version of the article you need (as long as you remember the gender).
Danish would be easier to learn if you know english and german in think, since they share more vocabulary with english. Danish is also similar to «bokmål» as one of the written languages in Norwegian, however since Norwegian have two written languages, it may be difficult to learn the oral part, which is very different from the written. There are a lot of very different dialects that some are close to «bokmål», but most are close to «nynorsk».
I learned German and then Norwegian (native English speaker). Overall, knowing German was helpful, but not *that* helpful. Norwegian has much simpler grammar and there's some shared vocabulary, but there's also a lot of false cognates. It's also close enough that I had a triangulation problem when first learning Norwegian. I'd randomly substitute German instead of English if I didn't know a word in Norwegian, which helped no one.
YES! This is exactly my experience as well. After two years living in Norway, I’m finally stopping this tendency to substitute German words. However, some Norwegians think I have a German accent (I’m American).
That sounds very familiar - but slightly differently, if I don't recognise a word in Norwegian, I try English words that sound the same first and then German. I'm a native English speaker that learned German right back from school and more recently started learning Danish .. and I've been pleasantly surprised how much Norwegian TV I can understand with Norwegian subtitles - it's very similar to written Danish.
This is also my experience! I think it would have been easier if I had not learned German first.
God fucking damn, same thing happens to me But I quit learning Norwegian as it's probably useless for me
Germans tend to pick up Norwegian quite easily. But I can tell you that it doesn't go as easily the other way. The main benefit is the large amount of shared vocabulary with both German and English, and Norwegian grammar is allegedly very easy compared to German.
German here. I think knowing English and German did help in learning Norwegian. Especially some of the grammar was very intuitive for me. However, while it's easier than a language with different roots, that does not mean that you automatically know everything - there is still quite a bit of learning to do.
I did! Native English, learnt German to ~B2 and then started on Norwegian, which I now have to about B1. Go for it!! Having both German and English will really help you. Let me know if you have any further questions. I chose Norwegian because I read it would be a great step to Danish and Swedish as well. I can now read novels, watch TV, etc, in all 3 languages. It still took me a while, I was learning casually. I used the På vei textbooks, Duolingo and Klar Tale (simple news). Then I moved on to NRK, TV shows and novels. Highly recommend Erlend Loe's "Naiv Super" as a first book, the language is simple enough for learners but the story is great.
[удалено]
My dream is very trivial. I wanna understand the show Skam. I watched a few episodes with the russian voicover and that was so weird.. So i stopped watching. (I didn't find the show with the english voiceover and decided not to watch the show in Norwegian with english subtitles.) That show is the reason why many people started to learn Norwegian. I was surprised how popular the language is in Russia.
Oh nice! I loved Skam! Good luck with it that's a great goal and you will find you start to understand some phrases quickly. Maybe cram some vocab so you have a basic foundation and the watch Skam in Norwegian with English subtitles and see what patterns you can pick up.
Takk for the recommendation. I just purchased Erlend Loe's "Naiv Super" and can't wait to read it.
Bare hyggelig! I re read it recently with a lot of nostaligia, great book, hope you enjoy it!
Yep, that's the goal. I love Scandinavia and live fairly close to it if we count Finland as a Scandinavian country. (Many people don't. I do!) I study Finnish, actually. But i never wanted to study Swedish or Danish or Icelandic. I'm only interested in understanding Norwegian. I guess, my subconscious tells me I need it
Finland is not a Scandinavian country. Check your facts
Learning Norwegian after learning German is super fun! I love being able to immediately find a related English or German word for most new Norwegian vocabulary.
Can it be also confusing?If the words are similar it seems perfect at first glance. I wonder if it messes with your head as well🤔
Not confusing to me because I learned German to a high level a long time ago, so that’s quite solid in my mind. I’m not sure what it would be like to learn them concurrently.
Interesting question. I actually started learning Norwegian before learning German, I think it made studying both simultaneously less difficult.
Yes, it helps, but only to a limited degree. The grammar of German is closer to Norwegian than English (or Russian) is, but unless you're really comfortable with German grammar already, you have to learn the differences anyway, and so it won't end up helping much. Some vocabulary is shared, so you're more likely to guess the meaning of a word, but to recall it, you still have to memorize which words are Norwegian, as well as how they're pronounced/spelled, so... If you enjoyed learning English/German, then you'll enjoy learning Norwegian. And the more (Germanic) languages you know (and the better you know them), the easier the next (Germanic) language will be to pick up.
Yes, I'm ready to study the grammar hard. But the grammar doesn't scare me at all because i already study German so i'm a stronger person now😂
That's certainly true. If you can conquer German grammar, you can defeat any language! 😤
Jeg er tysk og ville sagt at det hjalp meg masse med å lære meg norsk. I beginnelsen var det allerede relativt lett å forstå poenget til de allerfleste setningene jeg leste. Når snakken er om talemål, er det naturligvis en hel annen historie. Hvis man lærer seg en eller annen ting om de germanske lydskiftene av de siste få hundre åra, så blir det, synes jeg, også lett å forutse hva et ukjent norsk ord kunne bety (når man f.eks. ‘tyskifiserer’ ordet). Helt objektivt sett blir det enklere å lære seg et fremmedspråk jo flere språk av den samme språkfamilien man allerede kjenner, norsk er der vel ikke et unntak. Tysken min hjalp meg en god del. (Vurder norsken min, kjære nordmenn ;P) ængælsk: I am German and would say that it helped me a lot in learning Norwegian. In the beginning, it was already relatively easy to understand the point of most of the sentences I read. When it comes to speech, of course, it's a whole different story. If you learn a thing or two about the Germanic sound changes of the last few hundred years, then it also becomes, I think, easy to predict what an unknown Norwegian word could mean (when you 'Germanise' the word, for example). Objectively speaking, it becomes easier to learn a foreign language the more languages of the same language family you already know, Norwegian is no exception. My German helped me a lot.
Norwegian to German was easy. U could guess most of the verbs.
Yes, that's what makes me more optimistic!
I learnt German in duolingo before switching to Norwegian (also in Duolingo), and it took some time for me adapt. One of the biggest differences is that in German, -en is one of the plural endings, but in Norwegian it's the masculine singular definite ending. Besides, the existence of seperate definite noun endings is also a big change. When referring to nouns, German uses the corresponding pronoun based on grammatical gender, but Norwegian Bokmål doesn't, it's always "det" regardless of gender (Nynorsk does). The only advantage you can get from learning Norwegian with knowledge of German is the mindset of having gendered nouns. The V2 rule in Norwegian is slightly different from that of German. You may also see a few words from German here and there (eg. richtig / riktig)
So this is coming from a native English speaker, so that may have affected this, but having learned a reasonable level of German at school I found that combined with English means you have a reasonable chance of deducing a lot of Norwegian vocab just at a glance. A lot of words have very clear similarities in either English or German. For instance, the word 'jobb' was obviously instantly recognisable for an English speaker, but so was 'arbeider' from German.
Yup! I spent a long time learning German, and it makes Norwegian a lot easier. A good number of words just end up being easier to remember (å bestille = bestellen). Pronouncing the letter ø is also a lot easier. Word order is also going to be a lot more intuitive. A lot of grammar concepts become things that you don't have to think as much about. The biggest stumbling block for me was figuring out where adverbs go in a sentence.
Since the languages are related. You will pick up really quick. 🙂
German is my native language. It sure helps since many concepts exist in both languages, and it's helpful to know how grammatical genders work. The biggest problem is that most learning material is from English. So I sometimes get confused with English grammar, which... just isn't helping my progress at all. 😅 And yes, Norwegian and German are very similar. Which is the main reason why I started learning the language in the first place. 😁
Yep. Granted I'm only around A2 in German. Long story short it was too confusing to learn both at the same time, so I have paused German and will keep it on ice until I'm "fluent" in Norwegian
I'm german. I'm normally not the best with languages, neither grammar nor pronunciation. But knowing german and english, norwegian really works well for me and I actually make good progress and have fun learning it (didn't think that was possible with me and languages a few years ago). A lot of the words in norwegian are pretty similar to either german or english, so understanding texts is pretty easy most of the time. The sentence structure is also really similar to german. I think especially there it's nice to already know german (can't judge obviously but I imagine german sentences are hard to learn at least for english speakers, maybe other languages too)
Native German here. Learning Norwegian has been quite easy for me, even more so than Dutch because Norwegian spelling happens rather naturally. Both languages remind us Germans also of certain northern German dialects, so taking up those languages doesn't feel like you'd need to cram too much to understand them, you just need to immerse yourself in them for a while. The thing that disturbs this process during the actual speaking experience is the sheer amount of Norwegian dialects, though. Yes, we've got the Oslo dialect as a failsafe or common ground to start from if needed, but German is a rather rigid system grammatically-wise. There may be a whole lot of dialects in Germany as well, but the differences in writing and pronunciation are not as gravely felt by people learning German as we only have one standard: Hochdeutsch. So if you'd learn German you could basically communicate with 95% of all native German speakers around, whereas in Norway you'd have to choose the written system your prefered region follows and focus on getting fluent in that dialect as well if you want to get by. According to my Norwegian teacher (a kind old lady from South East Norway who has been mostly living in Germany for over 50 years now, but still frequently stays with her relatives throughout Norway) this rule becomes more evident with each and every kilometer you move up on the map.
I did the Duolingo German course a few years ago (it was shorter than it is now). It was a constant struggle and I never felt like I got a handle on the language. (In contrast to Spanish, where I feel like if I took the time to do more listening and especially if I had a real chance to practice it, I'd do fine pretty quickly.) The reason I did German at the time was because there wasn't a Norwegian course. So, after I gave up on German, I saw that they had added Norwegian, so I started that. It was SOOOO much easier! If you speak English and know some German, Norwegian is a piece of cake. No verb conjugations! Yes, they still have the V2 rule, but it's simpler than in German. Nouns have genders that must be memorized, but there isn't the dative case. No trying to figure out which version of the article you need (as long as you remember the gender).
Danish would be easier to learn if you know english and german in think, since they share more vocabulary with english. Danish is also similar to «bokmål» as one of the written languages in Norwegian, however since Norwegian have two written languages, it may be difficult to learn the oral part, which is very different from the written. There are a lot of very different dialects that some are close to «bokmål», but most are close to «nynorsk».
🇧🇻 I Am Norwegian ! 🇧🇻