Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

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PeterMollenburg
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Wed Jun 08, 2016 11:35 pm

Personally I think it's rubbish that you can't generalise. It reminds me of being told to be politically correct. Thus almost rendering one mute.

Yes it's a very subjective thing indeed. A HUGE amount of factors are at work, but the article is generalising (as am I) and I think one can easily generalise.

If we can say it's easy to learn Spanish if you already have learned Italian or that's it's easier for a German native speaker to learn Luxembourgish, Swiss German or Dutch than a native Mandarin speaker, then why on Earth can we not say Norwegian is easier for an English speaker (in general) to learn than say Hungarian?

Yes French is in the same group as Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian etc and I know from my subjective experience I have found French "harder" than Dutch or Spanish despite their being in the same category, as it has taken me much longer to attempt to perfect the sounds of the language than it took to do the same with Spanish or Dutch. Thus the "difficulty" here is in the time, not in the complexity and is very subjective indeed as another would not have the same experience as myself depending on their situation/ experience/ foreign language knowledge and so on.

I think it's perfectly fine to generalise (ie set all subjective experience/ background/ IQ/ whatever aside) and from what I can make out it does appear that Norwegian is one of the easier languages for an English speaker given the fact the grammar appears to be less complex than many other languages or more closely related to English than other languages.

I'm sure we won't all agree, but where's the harm in generalising? Think about it, do you not agree that a monolingual Italian would find Spanish easier to learn than a monolingual Mandarin speaker? If you agree then you can certainly generalise that Norwegian is easier than.../ easy/ not so difficult/ very difficult etc for an English speaker. Yes one's experience is subjective.

And yep, as some ppl have pointed out there appear to be 'easier' languages than Norwegian (for an English speaker) out there.

Still I don't believe by any means that Norwegian is a walk in the park. Any language no matter how 'easy' can be a MASSIVE undertaking if one wants to become very advanced/ obtain native-like professional standard proficiency. You could study your own language for your whole life and still only scratch the surface of the language.
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby Saim » Thu Jun 09, 2016 2:03 am

From this blog post;

For similar reasons I'm going to rule Scots out as well, in addition to the fact that there's still a debate as to whether it's a language or a dialect. In my opinion a language is an independent language if 1) There are grammatical rules of right and wrong (i.e. you can't just make it up as you go along) [...]


I'm not sure how seriously I'd take this fellow's opinion if he thinks there's such a thing as natural languages that don't have grammar, as if your interlocutor would understood you if the patterns behind your speech were spontaneously generated.
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jun 09, 2016 3:33 am

Saim wrote:I'm not sure how seriously I'd take this fellow's opinion if he thinks there's such a thing as natural languages that don't have grammar, as if your interlocutor would understood you if the patterns behind your speech were spontaneously generated.


I think s/he just means you can't just say that a baby's or a madman's incoherent babble is them speaking in their own language.

PeterMollenburg wrote:Okay Esperanto aside. Does anyone agree with the author of this article (below) that Norwegian is the easiest language for native English speakers to learn?


Didn't read the article and don't know Norwegian, but I've been finding Swedish so easy and have been learning it so fast I keep wondering why people don't learn Swedish as their "introduction to language-learning" language instead of Esperanto. I feel that Swedish is easy enough, it's an actual national language of a well-known country, and it gives you easier access to both Scandinavian and Germanic languages which many language-learners may want to learn some day.

Kind of off-topic but I want to sell Swedish to you :mrgreen:
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby Montmorency » Thu Jun 09, 2016 9:32 am

kunsttyv wrote:I also have the impression that Norwegian is one of the easiest languages out there, especially for English speakers and even more so for German and Dutch speakers. My colleagues are from many corners of the world, they all speak Norwegian at a high level, and most of them seem to agree that learning Norwegian was a pretty manageable task. The two Germans are indistinguishable from native Norwegian speakers. I didn't know they weren't Norwegian until they told me.

Many of them say that understanding the wide variety of different dialects you will encounter when living in the cities was the most challenging task. Not too surprising, considering that many Norwegians have some trouble with the same thing (especially speakers of the standard Oslo dialect, or at least that's one of the prejudices against the Oslo folks (I'm one of them)).


It was the thought of all those dialects that put me off Norwegian a little at first. Later on, from reading here and elsewhere, and some other experiences made me realise it probably wasn't a good reason not to try it.

I think the author of that article makes a good case for Scandinavian being an "easy" language-group for EN speakers to learn, and a good case for why Norwegian is a good choice out of the three, but his case for choosing Norwegian over Swedish and Danish does not rest on its being easier than the other two. So the headline of the article was a bit misleading.

Your description "a manageable task" is a good one and more realistic than "easy". :-)
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Jun 09, 2016 11:02 am

smallwhite wrote:
Kind of off-topic but I want to sell Swedish to you :mrgreen:


I do actually appreciate the 'sell' but right now i'm very tempted to add Norwegian to my daily routine ;)
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jun 09, 2016 11:38 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:I do actually appreciate the 'sell' but right now i'm very tempted to add Norwegian to my daily routine ;)

Why Norwegian over Swedish? Because of those mutual intelligibility percentages? Personally I prefer to perfectly understand 9m Swedes and partially understand 5m Norwegians than the other way round, perfectly understand 5m and partially 9m. But I bet a lot of us will end up learning both anyway! Maybe 6 months of one and 1 month of the other. My left hand has been trying very hard to stop my right hand from borrowing that "Norwegian: an essential grammar" from the library :evil:
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Jun 09, 2016 12:06 pm

smallwhite wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:I do actually appreciate the 'sell' but right now i'm very tempted to add Norwegian to my daily routine ;)

Why Norwegian over Swedish? Because of those mutual intelligibility percentages? Personally I prefer to perfectly understand 9m Swedes and partially understand 5m Norwegians than the other way round, perfectly understand 5m and partially 9m. But I bet a lot of us will end up learning both anyway! Maybe 6 months of one and 1 month of the other. My left hand has been trying very hard to stop my right hand from borrowing that "Norwegian: an essential grammar" from the library :evil:


9 million or 4 million, even 100,000, the fact is if an extra 5 million or whatever number of people generally makes no difference as i'm not ever going to be able to speak to even the first million ppl in my lifetime. I highly doubt i'd speak to half a million ppl in one language living in a monolingual environment and living to 120 years. I think geographical coverage is a better measure for those that like the idea of getting to different countries/parts of the world. One could argue that Norwegian has more coverage as its more useful in the other Scandanavian countries. But that's not my real reason for the choice...

...I have visited Norway and liked it very much (as did my wife) and we have some very good friends there- I am more likely to revisit them than find new good friends in Sweden and we are more likely to choose to live in Norway because they are there (our friends even suggested it). Plus upon google map comparisons, I prefer the more ruggard geography of Norway. The dialects are the downside.
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby Saim » Thu Jun 09, 2016 1:21 pm

smallwhite wrote:I think s/he just means you can't just say that a baby's or a madman's incoherent babble is them speaking in their own language.


Then why bring it up if the topic is whether Scots is a language or not? The article doesn't mention the question of what kind of speech constitutes language, but what kind of language (whether or not Scots is a language it still is language) constitutes a language as a discrete entity.

PeterMollenburg wrote:The dialects are the downside.


I would suggest that the dialects are in fact the upside -- they're probably a large part of the reason why Norwegians are better at understanding Danes and Swedes than the other way around. Being exposed to different kinds of Scandinavian speech will make it easier to understand the whole diasystem, and given how vibrant the dialects are in Norway that's probably the best place to do it.
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby YtownPolyglot » Thu Jun 09, 2016 7:32 pm

The snag here is that there is no "language-meter" out there we can use to compare the relative difficulty of languages. The best we can do is say that for most native speakers of English, Norwegian is among the easiest languages to learn based on its vocabulary and grammar.

On the other hand, how likely are Norwegians to respond to you in Norwegian if you speak Norwegian to them? If everybody wants to use their English on you, it is tougher to learn.
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Re: Is Norwegian the easiest for an EN native speaker?

Postby AdamD » Fri Jun 10, 2016 12:19 am

I think the article demonstrates that the belief in a language's ease or difficulty is inversely proportional to the authors knowledge of language learning. This type of article also sounds a bit like a get-rich-quick scheme, like there's a super easy way to learn an L2 and make your friends jealous.
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