One of the best things about living here is learning Norwegian. My goal is to learn and speak as much as I can and rely on English as little as possible. Norwegian really is my first second language (high school French was kind of a disaster) so every day I'm learning something new. I have way more motivation to learn Norwegian than I ever did French and am having much more success with it. I owe a lot of my progress to the background I got from basic Norwegian classes at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle (highly recommended, if only because you get to hang out with other people who love Norway). Those classes gave me a solid foundation to build on and that has made all the difference. I have a Canadian friend who moved here at the same time I did but without any previous language knowledge and we are at very different levels in our Norwegian ability. I can't imagine moving halfway around the world and starting from scratch with the language. I'm thankful that I at least knew what the "ø" should sound like even if I couldn't (and still can't) say it perfectly.
I also can't imagine not trying to learn Norwegian. Some people live here for years speaking English and not trying to learn Norwegian at all. I think that's sad and a little disrespectful. Especially because Norwegian is not that hard to learn. Unlike English it has rules and sticks to them and the spoken language is almost completely phonetic. I've found that learning Norwegian has made my experience better than it would have been and helped me connect with people in a different way, especially those that don't speak much English.
So how much Norwegian am I speaking? I don't really know. My comprehension is good and I can understand almost everything that's spoken, depending on the content and the dialect(s). Basically, I speak Norwegian whenever I have the chance. But that depends on the setting and who I'm talking to. At school it's mostly English because we have lectures and reading in English. With friends and family it's as much Norwegian as I can manage. It can be harder with people my own age because they speak faster and usually want a quick response, but most are very patient with me and have joined me in my quest to learn Norwegian.
Norwegian is a language of dialects and that deserves its own blog post so I won't go too much into the dialects here. The point is that there are approximately a million variations of spoken Norwegian, and this can make things confusing and difficult but also very fun. When I first got here it all just sounded like Norwegian, but then I began picking up on the differences between dialects and started to understand what people meant when they make fun of people from other places. Now I'm at the point where I can guess pretty well where people come from in Norway based on their accent, vocab, etc., always a fun game.
It's so fun to learn the nuances of another language and in that, learn more about the culture. I am determined to get as fluent as possible, though to be honest I'm a little worried about my English. Every once in a while I notice that I just used the wrong preposition in a sentence because I've been listening to non-native English for a while. And whether good or bad, you tend to start saying what you hear around you. Something I didn't expect was that I've also started to say "oi," a typical Norwegian response when you make a mistake or hear surprising news. That's something my family back home would poke fun at after we visited Norway but now I'm doing it too... Oi!
It's great to have the chance to learn a new language and I can't wait until I can say more of what I want to in conversations. My American accent shines through and I butcher a lot of things and struggle with grammar but I can't believe how much I've improved since I've gotten here. The cool thing is that most Norwegians can't either. They are usually surprised, and some are shocked, when they ask and I say I've lived here only since August. My dream is to be able to speak Norwegian as well as they speak English. So I definitely have a ways to go, men jeg tror det går bra.
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