All Scandinavian languages: comparison

[shreypete]

Hey guys,
I'm new to this forum and I was reading some very interesting, funny threads regarding the differences between the Scandinavian languages. I currently live in Prague and have taken an interest to learning a scandinavian language (mainly due to a large swedish and norwegian population here). I love languages in general. The two languages that I'm quite familiar with in the Germanic group of languages are english and german. I can't decide which scandinavian language to learn. Here are some of the criteria that I want to consider before learning a language:

1) grammar,syntax- complex, moderate, or easy?
2) language resources for the language online - more, few, or very few?
3) time - well this is more of a fixed factor for me as I can't spend much time (max up to 30-35 min a day).

I've read in a couple of forums that there aren't very many learning resources for Norwegian online. Is this true? I've read so many threads recommending beginners to start with Norwegian as it would help understand the other two but I've also heard this for Swedish. I would appreciate if someone could tell me what would be more practical.

And just some background info:
I'm a medical student studying in Europe, hoping to practice in the US (although I've considered Europe as a fall-back option - either UK or Norway but I'm almost 92% sure that I will be returning back to the States). I study in a city that has tons of swedish and norwegians which makes it even more harder to choose the language.

Thank you!!!

 

[SwedishGirl88]

Hello Shreypete!

As I am sure You already know, both Swedish and Norwegian (aswell as Danish) are North Germanic languages. This means they are closely related to one another and are considered to be mutually intelligable languages. Usually speakers of any of these three languages have no problem of understanding any of the others due to the fact that all 3 languages share much of their vocabularies. However studies show that Norwegian speaking people generally understand Danish and Swedish better than people who speak Danish or Swedish understand any of the other languages.

Although Swedish is considered a small language in the world, it is the biggest language within the Scandinavian language group with an estimated number of 10 million native speakers, which ranks it nr 74 on list of the largest languages in the world.

Swedish is of course the official language of Sweden but it is also the second national language in Finland, alongside Finnish. Approximately 4.7 million people speak Norwegian (ranked nr 111).

Regarding the degree of difficulty in learning the Swedish language: I have to tell you I am not sure whether it is considered to be difficult learning or not. What I do know is that Swedish morphology is similar to English, for example: adjectives are compared in the same way as in English.

I would like to recommend you visit Wikipedia where you will find more information about the Swedish and Norwegian languages aswell as further information on language courses etcetera.

As You might have noticed I am Swedish myself - so of course I am gonna recommend you study Swedish...but its totally your decision. However both languages are beautiful and I wish You all the best regardless of what language you choose to learn!

/B

 

[Wilma_Sweden]

I think that Norwegian and Swedish are probably equally easy (or hard) to learn for a native English speaker. There appears to be more online resources for Swedish, and we don't have the complication of the language split existing in Norwegian (nynorsk/bokmål). If you do end up working in Norway, your prior knowledge of Swedish should help you to quickly pick up Norwegian on location, at a proper language school.

On the other hand, if your time and effort are limited and you're absolutely positive that you might have a future in Norway rather than Sweden, then dive straight into Norwegian! I think employment opportunities for doctors should be as good in Sweden as in Norway - we are importing doctors from other parts of Europe because there is a shortage here... Perhaps the pay is better in Norway, though...

/Wilma

 

[Vikingo]

Shreypete, welcome to the forums!

Your three criteria are about equal in both languages. Swedish have more speakers, but you'll probably understand other Scandinavian languages slightly better with Norwegian. Although, for a foreigner, this argument might be mute, as you won't even understand the language you're learning in spoken form if you're not committed.

If you only have about half an hour a day available anyway, you're not really taking language learning seriously in any case.

Here's my suggestion: Get a girlfriend (or boyfriend) from the scandinavians living in your country, and choose your language according to that . If that's out of the question, at least get enough scandinavian friends from both countries to be able to choose... you will eventually need a reason to stay on course and learn enough to get by anyway.

Online resources? OK, first buy some grammar books and go through those. It's really not that hard. I know there are a few good ones for Norwegian written in English, and I'm sure the same is true for Swedish. The Norwegian series "På Vei" is written in several languages, and I've heard that it's ok, but there are also many others.

If you should choose Norwegian, I also have some online tips for you in addition to the ones in the resources-thread here. One is an online dictionary (Norwegian-English-Spanish) http://www.eltranslador.com/. Another one is http://www.nrk.no/nett-tv, where you can watch a lot of Norwegian TV programs for free to learn pronunciation etc.

Good luck

 

[shreypete]

Thank you very much guys. It is true that I can't unfortunately spend much time. But in summers, I will definitely able to devote more time for learning my target language. In fact currently I'm also learning czech, which is horribly hard for me (due to the number of cases and declensions and stuff like that).

I've heard both the languages on several occasions (online through radio and other sources; and also once when I went to Sweden when I was a kid but I can't remember much of that trip).

I'm thinking starting with Norwegian would be a good idea, even in terms of pronunciation because I read that it's more regular than that of Swedish. But one really good incentive of learning Swedish at least for a beginner is that there are quite a few free learning resources online that teach beginner Swedish. I don't know if there are many such free online resources for learning Norwegian. I would buy the book, but I know that I would waste too much time by learning these languages (which I unfortunately can't afford at this point of time), so I'll postpone that alternative for a bit later.

Thank you once again.

 

[janne273]

Two aspects that have only partially been covered by previous replies.

Swedish would be easier to pick up since most Swedes tend to speak in conformity of a language norm (if you disregard the prevalence of regional sounds), whereas in Norway dialects are still very strong (admittedly there are still areas in Sweden where you use dialect, but not at all to the same extent as in Norway). This means that spoken Norwegian tend to differ from written Norwegian, which may cause problems for anyone trying to pick up the language.. In additions Norwegians don't generally like norms in their language. As an example one of my best friends persists in writing the word if "viss" despite the fact that most Norwegians write it "hvis". He maintains that it's a part of his character...but try telling that to people trying to learn how to spell the word.

Most Norwegians would also understand you if you speak Swedish, whereas you would have troubles being understood in areas like Stockholm if you speak Norwegian. Being accustomed to dialects and Swedish television Norwegians have in general a higher acceptability for hearing variations of their language, and Swedish could be seen as just another dialect.

 

[shreypete]

Hey there Jane, thank you there for your reply.

I would still like to know which of the scandinavian languages have good online resources. So far I've heard that there are tons of swedish online resources for those who would like to start on swedish. Is true? Is this perhaps due to the fact that there are more swedish speakers than other.

 

[Wilma_Sweden]

Hey there Jane, thank you there for your reply.

I would still like to know which of the scandinavian languages have good online resources. So far I've heard that there are tons of swedish online resources for those who would like to start on swedish. Is true? Is this perhaps due to the fact that there are more swedish speakers than other.

At the top of this forum there is an excellent collection of links to resources for all the Scandinavian languages. In it, there are more resources for Swedish than for the other languages, and like yourself, I am assuming that this is because the number of Swedish speakers is the largest of them. One of the resources listed in the Swedish section (Lingu@net Europa) is a whole language portal written in 20 different languages, where you can search and find learning materials for almost all existing languages.

/Wilma

 

[shreypete]

thank you very much Wilma_Sweden. I shall start my Swedish learning quest soon....I'm quite excited. By the way if you don't mind me asking, how do the Swedish people treat foreigners when they speak in their language? Do they appreciate that or do they just reply back in English so as to avoid the foreign speakers from embarrassing themselves any further?

 

[DieuEtMonDroit]

As for the grammar, the swedish language has only a few verb tenses and there aren't different conjugations due to person. However there are lots of irregularities, both witihin the conjugation of verbs, adjectives and nouns. As for the subjunctive, most swedes don't even know that it exists.

 

[Wilma_Sweden]

By the way if you don't mind me asking, how do the Swedish people treat foreigners when they speak in their language? Do they appreciate that or do they just reply back in English so as to avoid the foreign speakers from embarrassing themselves any further?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I recognise anyone's need to practice their Swedish. We have so many immigrants learning Swedish that we are pretty used to foreign speakers who are trying, but struggling. We recognise their need to practice and let them get on with it, and often there is no other language to revert to, either. Obviously, if I ran into someone speaking Swedish with an English accent, I would probably suggest English as an option in case of total communications breakdown, but I would never ever laugh - anyone trying to learn Swedish without having to do it should have praise and encouragement, not ridicule!

/Wilma

 

[shreypete]

Well-said!!!!

 

[Zadrien]

thank you very much Wilma_Sweden. I shall start my Swedish learning quest soon....I'm quite excited. By the way if you don't mind me asking, how do the Swedish people treat foreigners when they speak in their language? Do they appreciate that or do they just reply back in English so as to avoid the foreign speakers from embarrassing themselves any further?

For what I have seen the problem is not that the Swedes reply back in English (even though it can probably depend on your level of Swedish), nor that they would laugh at you. I think the problem is that they most of the times don't correct you even if you ask them to; often they prefer not to correct you as long as they understand what you are saying.
Then of course it depends on the people. I've been practising with people who corrected me every two words (actually very few people, unfortunately), people who corrected me sometimes (when the mistakes I made were too big to be ignored eheh), but I've also heard of people who just kept replying in English whatever the effort you put into speaking in Swedish (very few, fortunately).

Good luck

 

[Stoggler]

I was wondering which of the North Germanic languages one would consider is the easiest to learn.

Clearly this depends on your own native language(s) and where you are coming from, but as a native English speaker I have looked at the Scandinavian languages and see many parallels with English, and plenty of aspects that are very different.

So, which would you say is the most difficult to learn, or the easiest? Here are a few thoughts from me to get started:

All the languages in question are phonologically challenging from an English point of view, with a number of consonant and vowel sounds that are alien to English.

Swedish and Norwegian has pitch accent, which is something that English speakers are not used to

Danish, I believe (but on iffy ground) has difficult sounds to master

Icelandic still retains a complicated declension system, that the others have (mostly) lost, and so the others have more in common with English.

Orthographically, there are sounds often dropped that are represented in the language - I understand that this happens a lot in Danish, not quite so much in Swedish, and even less so in Icelandic. Also, all have written letters that are different to English, but I personally don't find that a hindrance.

Lexically, there are many familiar words and concepts in all the languages due to the Norse influence on English.

Not an easy question to answer, I appreciate, but in terms of phonology, syntax, morphology, lexicon, orthography - what would you say was the easiest Norse language to learn?

Thanks

 

[USB-anslutning]

Out of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, I'd say Swedish and Norwegian are about equally hard as far as the languages go, but there are probably more resources for Swedish. I'm not sure of how big a deal pitch accent would be, you could just ignore it and it would be fine, even if you wouldn't sound like a native. Danish is probably more difficult, at least phonologically, by all other measures I'd say they're all the same with the caveat that Swedish being the largest probably having more resources.

I didn't include Icelandic because I know very little about it apart from being able to understand maybe 30% of it when written.

 

[Stoggler]

Thanks USB

I did find an old thread here on the mutual understanding of the Nordic languages that I was reading earlier, and it seems that the concensus on there was that a knowledge or learning Norwegian would give you a better ability to get to grips with Danish and Swedish - you'd be able to read Danish and understand spoken Swedish. Would you say that's a fair assessment?

Regarding your point about resources available, even living in London which is hardly short of decent bookshops, I note that the Scandinavian languages in general are not well covered, but there does appear to be more in Swedish that than the others.

Regards

 

[Grefsen]

Thanks USB

I did find an old thread here on the mutual understanding of the Nordic languages that I was reading earlier, and it seems that the concensus on there was that a knowledge or learning Norwegian would give you a better ability to get to grips with Danish and Swedish - you'd be able to read Danish and understand spoken Swedish. Would you say that's a fair assessment?

Thanks for starting this very interesting thread Stoggler. I've heard it said before too that one of the added bonuses of learning Norwegian is being able to read Danish as well as being able to understanding some spoken Swedish too, depending of course on the dialect.

The difficulty of learning the different Scandinavian languages was never really much of a consideration for me. My main motivation for learning Norwegian is that I'm a Norwegian-American with a very Norwegian last name who has some family and a lot of good friends currently living in Norway. I belong to several Norwegian organizations and I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to practice speaking Norwegian on a regular basis here in Southern California.

I must admit that I've never made a serious attempt at learning Danish or Swedish, but have had Danish and Swedish friends teach me as few words and phrases over the years. One of my best friends is Icelandic and that has been my main motivation for wanting to learn some Icelandic words and phrases too.

 

[Grefsen]

Regarding your point about resources available, even living in London which is hardly short of decent bookshops, I note that the Scandinavian languages in general are not well covered, but there does appear to be more in Swedish that than the others.

I bought most of the books that I am using to help me learn Norwegian at bookstores in Oslo. I haven't ever attempted to buy any Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic books, but I would think you would be able to find online just about all of the resources you would need for learning those languages.

I also need to give a lot of credit to my friends here in the Word Reference Nordic Forum for all of the help they have given me during the past 2 1/2 years. The vast majority of the help I have received here has been from native speaking Norwegians, but I have also received some very valuable assistance from some who speak Norwegian as their second language as well as from Swedes, Danes, and even a few Icelanders too.

 

[Grefsen]

Regarding your point about resources available, even living in London which is hardly short of decent bookshops, I note that the Scandinavian languages in general are not well covered, but there does appear to be more in Swedish that than the others.

If you had taken a snapshot of the first page of this Nordic Language Forum at 18.30 GMT today (Wednesday August 26, 2009) you would find the following breakdown by language of the first 50 threads in this forum:

Norwegian 20

Swedish 14

Danish 7

Icelandic 7

All Scandinavian 2

Then if you check the next 50 threads on page two, here are the results:

Swedish 20

Norwegian 18

Icelandic 8

Danish 3

Old Norse 1

I realize that this is not scientific by any means, but it does at least show a general trend over the past month or so that at least here at the WordReference, Norwegian and Swedish have been the two most popular Nordic languages.

 

[dinji]

I agree with former posters that pitch accent is not much of an issue. The realisation of the pitch accents varies so much between dialects that omitting it altogether is not fatal. Swedish (and AFAIK also Norwegian) has dialects in the very north where pitch accent is omitted. And within Swedish, Finland Swedish, one of the three "standard variaties" (being 1: central "Svealand" standard pronounciation 2: southern pronounciation 3: Finland Swedish) has no pitch accent distinction.
(This as opposed to the Västnyland dialect in South-Western Finland which does have pitch accent)

In terms of access to the whole Scandinavian language area Norwegian is by far the best choice for reasons given above.

I would also add a further argument for Norwegian: Norwegian is the language where spelling and pronounciation goes hand i hand much better than in Danish and also better than in Swedish to a significant extent. This will help the beginner a lot.

On the minus side for Norwegian I would add that the language standard is still fluid. Many words and suffixes may be spelled in more than one way depending on the style of the text. In fact there are two Norwegian "languages" (norms of written language) and within both langauges there are alternative forms. On the other hand some of the alternative forms are similar to Danish or Swedish forms so by learning them you also improve your ability to understand one or the other.

Having said this Swedish is of course the most beautiful language on this planet....

 

[mezzoforte]

Ok, I am learning Norwegian because it's supposedly intelligible to both Danes and Swedes, even though Danes and Swedes are not intelligible to each other. So I feel like it's more bang for my fjord.

<<Deleted letters>>

P.S. I think this was said above, but I didn't read it before this post.

 

[Mons_17]

I find it hard to believe that Norwegian is considered "hard" to learn - when I began learning it, I found that it was quite similar to English, whereas Swedish and Danish appear more complicated to me.

I'm no linguistics scholar, and this is just my experience, so feel free to disregard it.

 

[Wilma_Sweden]

Since there are already two largish threads comparing the Nordic languages from various points of view, I am adding this to a previous thread to avoid repetition.

Please note that there is also an additional thread comparing the Nordic languages:

All Scandinavian languages: Mutual intelligibility/Difficulty

/Wilma, Moderator

 

[Sepia]

I find it hard to believe that Norwegian is considered "hard" to learn - when I began learning it, I found that it was quite similar to English, whereas Swedish and Danish appear more complicated to me.

I'm no linguistics scholar, and this is just my experience, so feel free to disregard it.

What grammar and vocabulary are concerned I really cannot believe ther'd be much difference in the effort needed to learn any one of the three languages.

What pronounciation and listening/understanding the language I am pretty sure that Swedish would be the easiest one to most people. They usually have a very clear and distinct pronounciation - when you know the rules you can easily figure out how a word is written when you hear it. Danish is different on that point. Sometimes very different!

 

[Wilma_Sweden]

What pronounciation and listening/understanding the language I am pretty sure that Swedish would be the easiest one to most people. They usually have a very clear and distinct pronounciation - when you know the rules you can easily figure out how a word is written when you hear it.

In a re-run of "Svenska dialektmysterier"(*), a TV series about the Swedish language and its dialects, Fredrik Lindström claims (in part 3) that schools for decades discouraged dialects and taught children to articulate and pronounce each letter carefully. To me, that is suggesting that speech was to some extent adapted to spelling, and I'm not sure if it's still significant or has any bearing when compared to Danish or Norwegian. However, it did help kill several dialects.

Danish is different on that point. Sometimes very different!

Indeed! Still, it's not much worse than trying to decipher Glaswegian English when you're used to the Queen's version...

/Wilma

(*) More info here.