Brun Ugle wrote:Mista wrote:Brun Ugle wrote:One of the problems is, I'm no longer in college. I have two college degrees, one from the US and one from Norway, and I'd say both my English and my Norwegian have atrophied somewhat from the level I had when I had to write papers all the time, but my English remains a bit stronger because it is my native language and because I use it a lot on the internet. I found my Norwegian level started to go down after I finished college and started working, because suddenly I didn't have to write anymore.
You didn't mention if you are planning to to any writing this year, but if you are, I'd be happy to give you feedback on it, if you like.
Sure, that would be great. I'm thinking of writing next year's log in several of my target languages, so I will probably include Norwegian. Ironically, although it is my best foreign language, it is the one I'm most ashamed to write in publically because I always feel it should be much better. I guess this is the result of learning a language mostly by just being in the country rather than having a solid foundation of study. Anyway, I would be happy to have corrections in any of my languages, so if it isn't too much work for you, I'd be glad to have you correct me, or just point out the worst mistakes if that's easier.
Mista wrote:Brun Ugle wrote:I can see how 2019 is going to be 365 days of everyone on the forum trying to trick me into learning a new language and me trying to resist. Rdearman will probably even start a challenge to see who can get me to start a new language. Hmmm. I wonder what the prize will be.... Maybe I should join.
I think you should join me and study Sami. It's an official language in Norway, after all
I would love to learn Sami, but it will have to wait until after 2019. There's something I've been wondering about though. Maybe you can tell me. I know there are several Sami languages and as I understand it, they are fairly different. Yet on official web pages and suchlike, you can usually just choose between Bokmål, Nynorsk and Sami. So, which Sami is it? And can all Sami speakers understand it? Is there perhaps just one written language and several spoken one's, like Arabic?
I'll jump in even though I'm not Mista.
If you're on a Norwegian site, then the most likely language under "Samisk" is Northern Saami, which is the most widely spoken Saamic language and has the largest Saamic speech community at about 20,000 people. However, you may also stumble upon media in Southern Saami (Sørsamisk) or Lule Saami (Lulesamisk) which are spoken by about 600 and 1,500 people respectively. The other Saamic language in Norway is Ume (Pite Saami is spoken in Sweden, however) and has a tiny community of around 20 speakers. You'll be hard pressed to find much material in it. Mutual intelligibility between Saamic languages varies, and today the languages are classified into two groups: Eastern and Western. Northern Saami, Lule Saami, Ume Saami, Pite Saami, and Southern Saami are in the western group, while Inari Saami, Skolt Saami, and Kildin Saami are in the eastern group. Northern Saami and Lule Saami are fairly close, but still distinct enough. Southern Saami is less similar. Pite and Ume seem in between Southern Saami and Lule Saami. On the eastern side, Inari Saami is kinda sorta between Northern Saami and Skolt Saami even though Northern Saami is a western Saamic language (a comparable situation would be to think of the similarity between some (Jutlandic) Danish dialects and (Low) German dialects spoken along the border of Denmark and Germany. They resemble each other more than what you may expect when looking at the language family tree which treats Danish as North Germanic and German as West Germanic)
You can tell the languages' distinctiveness aurally and visually (this is easier for natives to do!), although as far as I remember Pite Saami has no official alphabet. It's nothing at all like Arabic or even Sinitic languages since it's not at all the case that speakers of Saamic regularly use, say, Northern Saami as the common language like speakers of Arabic and Sinitic languages can do with MSA and Mandarin respectively. For example, in the Saami Parliament of Norway, I suspect that it's more likely that a politician there whose native language is Southern Saami would speak Norwegian to a colleague whose native language is Northern Saami, instead of going at it with each using his/her native Saamic language (unless either one of these people can speak Northern and Southern Saami, and so dispense with the Norwegian "bridge-language").
Any Saamic language is extra tough to learn without a background in Finnish or Estonian, but it must be feasible on seeing the classes and learning material meant for Norwegians or Swedes who can't cash in on the Finno-Saamic discount. An advantage that you and Mista would have over me is that your knowledge of Norwegian would let you use the available learning material printed in Norwegian or even Swedish with ease. I had to make to do with Finnish editions of books and dictionaries for Northern Saami and Inari Saami using my shaky knowledge of Finnish (and looking up stuff often enough in my Finnish-English dictionary).