Hei! Hvordan har du det? Bra, takk.
That's about the extent of my Norwegian-off-the-cuff to humans (I can ask my Norwegian Forest Cat if he wants milk, tell him he's a handsome Forest Cat, etc., etc.). I used to be fluent in German, and after struggling to regain it past a certain point . . . my German 550 prof at ASU didn't really help. Instead of making sure we grasped a good functioning of German at that level, she blasted through the entire textbook in just 7 weeks and made us all use a translation app: Linguee. Don't get me wrong. It's a good app. I didn't want to be app dependent, though. I wanted to be able to read and speak German at the level I used to do.
So I continued to struggle with regaining German after the class was over, past graduation, and into the summer. By the end of August, I had gotten so frustrated, I wanted to throw all my carefully saved, and newly curated, German books out of the window.
I quit.
Then my middle son, the one who's the goalie (haha, I managed to not mention hockey until my second post; a miracle!), who has been struggling with Norwegian on his own for most of 2020, asked if I'd learn it with him. (You may be wondering why I don't speak it to him instead of the cat. He's also a gamer; I'm up hours before he is.)
I'm pretty sure that I don't need to tell anyone here that starting a new language while not even finished with the first semester of another one, is not recommended.
However, after listening to a bit of authentic Norwegian speakers, I realized the tones and cadence weren't that far off from Cherokee.
I thought I'd at least give it a go. After all, in addition to being a direct descendant of two tribal chiefs plus a great-great-Cherokee-grandma, I'm also a direct descendant of Harald Fairhair, first king of Norway. And I grew up far enough back in the Applachian Mountains that I grew up speaking at least half my sentences in Middle English. Could I actually do this?
To my surprise, and delight, I learned more Norwegian in 24 hours than I could remember in German. Granted, over half of it is what I say to my cat every morning, but it might come in useful elsewhere? Maybe?
And, I've actually begun to remember a bit more German. Thankfully, my brain isn't getting them all mixed up, either. Perhaps because a lot of Norwegian is the same as German, or similar? Does anyone else have a perspective on that?
I hope to post my Norwegian Adventure posts in both English and Norwegian, so future ones may be a bit simple, but I'm looking forward to giving myself a 30 minute Norwegian challenge every morning. (My Cherokee posts will be in the evening.)
My first goal I'm going to set for myself is to write a very short 1-2 paragraph story in Norwegian, and the second is going to be to translate it into Cherokee.
We'll see if it works!
Ha det bra!
~Diana
Hi Diana! I didn't quite grasp why your son is learning Norwegian. And do you learn together now or everyone on their own?
What a fun idea to learn Norwegian! Especially with your son. I understood everything you wrote in Norwegian, since Im swedish, haha :) They are very similar languages.
@LindasLinguas, That's a 'funny' family story. My whole life, and my dad's, we were told that our last name is German--the English version of the German "Schulung." My sister finally got farther back in our genealogy, and found out that side of the family emigrated to the US from York. My sister was like "we're English," and I was like "um, no, we aren't; York isn't English; It may be part of the UK now, but it isn't English." I had just seen the 2016 NOVA program on Vikings, and it covered how they expanded York into a thriving metropolis, and even their coinage had Christian-Pagan-Muslim symbols on them. It was part of what was, at the time, called the Danelaw, because Denmark was ruling most of Scandinavia at the time. . . so being an English teacher, I figured out the word for school in Norwegian (it's also the same in Danish), and then listened through every beginning video on YouTube until I heard what I was looking for, and it wasn't Danish. The original name was Schooley (indeed, I've got a rather famous cousin with that spelling, who is one of the most followed journalists on Twitter), and that's exactly how you pronounce the word 'skule,' or school, in Norwegian. That led my sister to explore that genealogy further, and she found out that line of our heritage is directly descended from Harald Fairhair, the first king of Norway. I volunteered at our local Sons of Norway Christmas fundraiser in Dec 2019, when a very obviously Norwegian lady walked up to me and said, "You're Muscogee-Creek!" And then stood there and told me the oral history of my dad's primary tribe, while I stood there with my mouth open. They wanted me to take their onsite language lessons at the time, but I was still focused on reclaiming my German fluency. Just as well, I suppose, with the pandemic. At this rate, we should be able to pick up a good, basic, proficiency in it and maybe wow a few people, plus get corrections, when they can do pancake fundraisers again, fingers-crossed, in the fall. Paul is doing his actual study mostly on his own, as am I, and then I'm initiating as much conversation as I can in Norwegian. I sprang that on him last month while we were grocery shopping, suddenly switching from asking what he wanted in English, to "Er du tørst?" (Are you thirsty?) Nothing like rendering a 6ft tall Viking-looking ice hockey goalie completely speechless. :D (He's got the red beard and the curly hair, in a Viking bun.)
@Chocolate_Frog, My son took a beginner course in Swedish online during high school, and did pretty well, but the vocabulary didn't stick with him. He didn't use it a lot, though, as one of our hockey families had their oldest son, and his teammate, have to drop out from a cracked sternum (Angelica is learning Swedish). I've got former in-laws in Sweden! Do you know who Chris Laney is? He had his own band for awhile and a solo career, but he mostly does record producing (like for Crash Diet), and is currently with Pretty Maids as a musician. I've read that there are enough similarities in Swedish and Norwegian, that they can kind of get the idea of what is being talked about. Would you say that's true? I ask because I'm wanting to pursue my PhD in Scandinavia, and there's one in Norway that looks really good . . . but, I also understand that there are more opportunities for adult recreational hockey in Sweden, plus I really like what I've read about how their PhD programmes are structured there.(Of course, I have not mentioned this to the former in-laws because they'd all start with, "You need to pick Sweden!") It sounds, linguistically, like it might be similar to the way Portuguese and Spanish are to each other.