When learning a new language, the ultimate goal, beside fluency of course, is to be able to sound as much like a native speaker as possible, to not be immediately singled out as the foreigner in a conversation. To help you achieve your goal, we have put together a list of tips and tricks that will help you speak Norwegian better and make it easier for you to blend in with the natives – linguistically speaking.
The bane of any Norwegian learner’s existence – dialects, dialects, dialects
As you might already know, Norwegian poses a small problem for non-native speakers – it has an incredibly varied range of dialects. Since you decided to learn the language, you are probably aware of this. If you are already living in the country, you are likely frustrated by it. When it comes to pronunciation, it’s kind of both, the good news and the bad wrapped up in one. Since there’s almost as many dialects as there are places in Norway, chances are there is someone somewhere that pronounces a word or phrase the same way as you do and chalks it up to it being a dialectal variant. But it makes it somewhat difficult to understand what people around you are saying, let alone to try and adapt their way of speaking to yours.
The easiest variant to comprehend is Urban East Norwegian (standard østnorsk), the standardized spoken language based on the written language bokmål. Though strictly speaking not a dialect, it is the easiest to learn as it most often used on TV, radio and other media outlets. It is also closest to the dialect of the Oslo-region and the East.
Now that we have scared the bejesus out of you, what tips do we have to help you understand the dialects and improve your own accent? Meet your new best friend – NRK Radio. Here you can listen to local news and all sorts of other programmes from all the regions of the country. As we have mentioned in our previous blog post, watching series and movies with subtitles, listening to audiobooks, radio programmes and podcasts is one of the best ways for you to improve your skills. Repeating what you hear, especially more difficult words and phrases, recording yourself and correcting your mistakes is a form of active learning that few other things can top.
