Journal: Entry for Joel

I mean, seriously, people, after all the complaints I've had to endure from non-native English speakers about Englishs silent "e", and even the occasional glare at the "k" in "knife" (blame the Germans, and be glad we don't make you try to pronounce it, like they do; part of me suspects why nossy and Jens get along well because he's one of the few people who can correctly pronounce her name... ) I'm now being confronted with:

The silent "v" in "talv" (but how often do you need the number 12, really? ),
The silent "t" in "det" (and who knows how many others),
The silent "g" in, well, everything, really, but most noticably in "jeg" and "meg" (again, how often do you say, "I" or "me", and wtF is that pronounced "jei"? ) and
the silent "d" in "god" (which isn't god at all, it's dårlig).

I know there was a fifth one, but I think I've had too much system shock to recall it now.

Speed bumps though, really; all in all I think it's going well, or jeg tenker det går bra. Verb conjugation is completely unaffected by subjects, no "I write" but "she writes", so I only have to worry about cases and, as in German, there's no morphological difference between perfect and present perfect so there's one less case to worry about as well. I dare say 75% of words are cognates with either a German or English one; "ro" appears to be a cognate in BOTH; since English "row" is a very different concept than German "ruh" I can find no other explanation for why "ro" means both "row (a boat)" and "quiet". Vocabularly doesn't seem a huge problem though, except when I think Use the other language, Luke, then say something in German instead of Norwegian (very easy to do so since they're often so close).

That means I can focus on conjugation, declension and, of course, pronunciation, but I think I've just about got the last one down. Near as I can tell, Norwegian has an actual LETTER for the schwa, "ø", instead of letting whatever vowel is handy stand in for it like English does; when you English speakers see "ø" in Scandinavian texts I recommend just thinking, schwa . "Å" is just "ah" with rounded lips and "æ" seems pretty close to the "a" in "apple". The ones causing the most trouble are letters I know, the difference between "o/u" and "i/y" but it seems to lie in the same place as "å": "o" and "y" are just "u" and "i" with rounded lips. That may not be perfect, but seems close enough for comprehension.

Declensions are going to be the frustrating annoying pain, because English does it so little (almost not at all for articles and adjectives, and even with pronouns the only time you call something "him" is when you know it has a Y chromosome). I knew that going into this though and have been bracing myself for it since deciding to move. At least I had some warning; there's a guy from South Africa in my norskkurs who raised the question "So, how do you know when a word is masculine/feminine/neuter? Do you just have to learn it for each word?" Yup. Norwegian's evidently getting better though; apparently it's acceptable even in formal writing to use the masculine declensions for both male and female, and that pretty much just leaves neuter and plural to remember along with masculine declensions. It's definitely not all bad; the silent "g" means that to the extent adverbs are "declined adjectives", while they tend to be formed in "lig" it's pronounced like English "ly", just as with most of our adverbs.

So, for those who were wondering how it's going language-wise: Wonder no longer (and for those fluent in Norwegian: You can stop snickering now, you smug SOBs. ) The course wraps at the end of next month, counts for as 48 of the required hours in Norwegian language necessary to get a residence permit and will provide me with a certificate proudly proclaiming I'm not UTTERLY ignorant of the language. Hopefully by then I'll be able to understand enough of my wedding ceremony that I don't end up saying, "Jeg vil, " in response to "Will you let me sell your kidney in Bulgaria?"