Is Norwegian a good choice for me?

I am a native English speaker. I learned a few words of French and Indonesian in school but have never aquired a second language. I'm thinking about learning Norwegian but have some concerns. Background info first:

My goals (to be expanded and refined):

  • Short term: be able to read childrens books to my daughter
  • Medium term: Enjoy reading fiction
  • Long term: Get more out of traveling to Norway and othet Scandinavian countries.

Reasons - I want to learn an new language for my benefit and to help my 2 year old daughter learn a second language in the coming years. - The culture of Norway interests me greatly. - I am interested in Norse mythology and Germanic paganism. I imagine that learning the Norwegian language should provide some insights on these topics and allow my to read related fiction and academic writing. - I am told Norwegian grammar is almost identical to English. I think difficult grammar would be likely to cause me to lose motivation to learn a language. I spent a handful of hours learning Italian and this is the reason I stopped. - Gendered objects. My understanding is that Norwegian does not assign genders to objects. I dislike the idea of thinking about the world this way and would not want to teach a highly gendered language to my daughter.

Concerns:

I have several concerns that I would appreciate help with. If Norwegian doesn't turn out to be a good fit, I would be looking at Itallian as my wife is reasonably proficient with it.

  1. Does Norwegian use gendered gendered terms for objects?

  2. Is the there going to be a good amount of media to help me learn and make it worth learning. My understanding is that English is very commonly spoken in Norway and Norwegians can understand related Scandinavian languages. Are many books, movies, children's shows etc.produced in Norwegian? I have heard that written Norwegian was originally based on Danish and that Danish was used as the writren language in Norway for a long time. Does that mean that many of the great works of Norway are actually written in Danish?

  3. I know that there arn't that many Norwegian speakers in the world but that it has the advantage of helping to understand Danish and Swedish. Do the people of Scandinavia speak english so well that learning Norwegian wouldn't really improve the experience of traveling there?

submitted by /u/Asahiburger
[link] [comments]

from Ongi etorri | Languagelearning https://ift.tt/3bs3c0g
via Learn Online English Speaking

Comments