Tag Archives: Norwegian language

Non-conversational reminiscences

The Hafrsfjord Jubilee in Stavanger. These are some of the many people I did not talk to in Norway.

No book review tonight. I’ve had a sudden onset of translation work, which is a development approved at the highest levels. It had been a while. But it slows down my reading.

So let’s pick up on a subject I left hanging. I wrote a lot here, before I left, about my self-education program to improve my conversational Norwegian. I downloaded an app to listen to Norwegian radio, and watched some Norwegian TV too. How did that go, you ask?

Not very well, to be honest.

During the course of my preparations, I thought I was comprehending the language a little better. That didn’t “translate” (pun unintended) into any actual benefit, in practice. When I faced real human beings in Norway, I found I still couldn’t understand them without several repetitions. And I hate inconveniencing people. Especially when they generally speak English already, and the whole thing could be done more efficiently that way.

Discursive interjection: What is it with language study books and the conversations they give you to memorize? I didn’t resort to any of those during this process, but I often thought back to my time as a student.

A model conversation for the student to memorize goes like this:

Student: “Kan du si meg veien til stasjonen?” [Could you tell me how to get to the station?}

Policeman: “Ja, rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.” [Yes, straight ahead to the corner, then turn left.]

Now we all know what happens in real life:

Student: “Kan du si meg veien til stasjonen?”

Policeman. “Ja, rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.”

Student: “Unnskyld? Vil du si det igjen?” [Excuse me? Could you say that again?]

Policeman: “Rett fram til hjørnen, og så til venstre.”

Student: “Si det igjen, takk?” [Say that again, please?]

Policeman: “You are an American, right?”

Student: “Yeah…”

Policeman: “Just go straight ahead to the corner, take a left and you’re there.”

Student. “Oh. Okay. Uh… takk.”

That’s how it actually works. And that’s how it generally happens in my experience. Carrying out a full conversation, when the other person is an English speaker, is just asking them to spend time being my teacher for free. And I can’t ask that.

Cant. Ask. That. It’s not in me.

However, on a few occasions, I did encounter people whose English was worse than my Norwegian. Then I was able to communicate, with some effort.

And that’s the return I got for my effort. I guess it’s something.

There was a joke I used to make, when I was young and studying Norwegian. I said, “I want to be able to not talk to people in a second language.”

Turns out I spoke prophetically.

I’m pretty sure a normal person would be conversational at this point. I think my real problem is psychological – I’m blocked by my social discomfort.

Still and all, my print-only language skills allow me to make some money in hard times. That’s nothing to nyse [sneeze] at.

Wodehouse and other trivia

Above, for no other reason than that somebody posted it on Facebook, a bit of an interview with P. G. Wodehouse. I’m guessing it’s from the 1960s or so, and he had a long and productive career still ahead of him at that point. An inspiration to us all.

I note that somebody blocked sharing on the video of Norwegian Constitution Day festivities I posted yesterday. Just as well, I suppose. I thought it was from the same day, but I’ve since seen actual 2022 footage, and everybody in the Royal Family looks older. I won’t delete the post – a man might as well stand behind his honest errors and take his lumps.

The May 17 celebration last night went well, and I think my lecture was a success. So I was told, anyway. We had an actual Hardanger fiddle player there, dressed in a bunad (folk costume), which lent plausibility to the proceedings.

Gradually I am completing my preparations for my Great Adventure in Norway. Today I finally succeeded in alerting my credit card company to the fact that I’ll be traveling to unaccustomed spaces. They have a button for that purpose on their member’s page online, but pushing that button produces no results at all, like those “Close Door” buttons in elevators. So today I called them, worked my way through the phone tree, and got the notification done. I looked about me for the praise of the multitude, but alas, I was by myself. So I tell you now.

Next challenge, activating the European sim card I bought for my cell phone.

I think I’m making progress on my Norwegian language comprehension. I decided yesterday that I was understanding just a little more of the news broadcasts on Norwegian state radio. Not enough to be of much practical use yet, but something. A little. Maybe. I hope.

Surfing waves of sound

Photo credit; Sincerely Media. Unsplash license.

Tonight, another pulse-pounding report on my ongoing conversational Norwegian project.

If you haven’t been following these posts, the situation is this: I know the Norwegian language well enough to be supplementing my retirement (and quite well, lately) by doing Norwegian translation for pay. But this facility applies only to the written word. I have a lot of trouble understanding it spoken.

To fix this situation, I took the advice of commenter Deborah HH, who suggested I download a radio app and listen to Norwegian radio. This project has worked far better than I ever hoped.

So here’s where I am. Each day, as a sort of sound track to whatever I’m doing, I listen to NRK all-day news (think the BBC, but in Norwegian for Norwegians). However, they turn the broadcast over to a BBC feed at night (around 3:00 p.m. my time). At that point I turn to Jæren Misjonsradio, a Christian station from Stavanger. A further wrinkle is that there’s no NRK all-day news on weekends. So I spend that entire period with the Christian station. This is not a trial – I rather enjoy it, and even feel it’s edifying me (“edification,” oppbyggelse, is a word we use a lot in Norwegian pietism).

However, there’s a sort of a whiplash effect. I understand what I hear on the Christian station pretty well by now. Enough to make me feel I’m making significant progress.

But when I get back to NRK on Mondays, I find I’m not comprehending at the same level. This is, I’m pretty sure, due to the fact that I listen to preachers on the Christian station, preaching the Bible. I can always recognize their texts, and it’s easy to intuit what they’re saying even if I miss some words. I know the jargon, and the customs of the tribe.

But when I’ve got people on NRK discussing the latest action in Ukraine, or who’s ahead in parliamentary polling, there’s a lot less predictable stuff. So I struggle a little, and have to revise my estimation of my progress downward.

Nevertheless, I am making palpable progress. And I suspect more and more that the process is more subconscious than conscious. When I concentrate on listening and interpreting, I have trouble. If I just relax, recognizable patterns swim into my ken.

I’m recognizing phrases more and more. It’s rather exhilarating, like surfing waves of sound. You’re not doing rational analysis when you do this, but responding with a kind of muscle memory of the mind.

Listening comprehension

Photo credit: Franco Antonio Giovanella . Unsplash license.

Still busy with my big translating project. I expect it will be done tomorrow. I worked through the weekend, and even had to work on Sunday, which I generally try not to do. But I kept the hours short that day, and made sure I gave myself time to relax on the sofa with an e-book in the afternoon. It was a beautiful day – not as beautiful as today (it almost got up to 70 degrees), but sunnier.

And a wonderful thing happened.

You may recall how I’ve been talking about “totally immersing” myself in Norwegian, to improve my conversational skills. I read the language well, but have trouble understanding it when spoken. So I started listening to Norwegian radio through an app on my phone. News from the state broadcasting channel, and a gospel station from Stavanger. Which meant the gospel station all weekend, because the all-day news channel turns into a BBC feed on Saturdays and Sundays.

So I was lying there on the couch, reading my book and listening to the gospel station. A man was preaching. And suddenly I realized I could understand him, pretty much.

I stopped reading and listened closely. Yes, I could follow him, most of the time. 75% comprehension, I’d say. Enough to follow his line of thought.

Now I need to explicate. He was speaking very distinctly and clearly, in the way of good preachers (though he was using a dialect, but I know most of the variant terms). And he was preaching from the Bible, so I understood all the quotations right off. So I’d compare my experience to someone learning to read with a beginner’s level book.

But being able to read a beginner’s book is a start. Listening to other things, I’m pretty sure I’m understanding more than I did. A week ago I was catching nothing but a few scattered nouns and verbs.

I lay there for a while with a feeling of wellbeing I haven’t experienced in a long time.

There’s a negative side-effect I find interesting. When I think about what I’m doing, there’s a small voice in my mind screaming “NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS! YOU AREN’T ABLE TO DO THIS!

Examining it dispassionately, I think it’s related to my shyness/avoidance. The insane guy in my head is trying to protect me from the dangers of human interaction, terrified I’m going to open another portal by which enemies may enter.

That’s just part of the deal, I guess. I’ll have to handle it.

A more pleasant side effect is that I’ve been sleeping well. As an old man, I’ve gotten used to a state of things where I go to sleep around midnight and wake up around 6:00 a.m. Then I try to get back to sleep. Usually without success. But now I turn on Norwegian radio and listen to it idly while trying to get back to sleep, and so far it’s worked. Which means I’ve gotten three straight nights of relatively normal sleep hours.

I still feel tired, but that’s got to be a good thing.

Swimming in linguistic waters

Nothing to review, and I’ve done little but work in the last few days (no, that’s not true. I loafed yesterday. It was Sunday). So I’m journaling today, I guess. Yet again.

It was warm today, in the upper 30s. Tomorrow will be even better, and I don’t see a freezing day on the horizon. I approve of this development. I shall tip the waiter generously.

I complained, the other day, about my inability to understand spoken Norwegian, the language I translate professionally in text form. One of our readers, Deborah HH, suggested I listen to Norwegian radio. I thought this an excellent suggestion, and installed a Norwegian radio app on my cell phone.

My strategy (or wishful thinking) is to attack the problem subconsciously. I will just have the radio on, listening idly as I do other things. No sustained effort to understand what I’m hearing. My working theory is that that effort is a part of the problem. I know all these words. I just don’t process them when they come in through the audible gate. When I consciously try to interpret, I get hung up on individual words and lose the flow. What I need is an involuntary response. I’m hoping that as I listen over time, my subconscious will jump the gap and connect to my dictionary storage unit. Something like “total immersion” learning.

It took some searching to find the channels I wanted. Most Norwegian radio is indistinguishable from American radio, except for the announcements. They play music, and it’s mostly American music. I wanted talk, and in the Old Country language. There’s an NRK (Norwegian National Broadcasting) channel that’s all news, and that’s just the thing, as far as it goes. But around 2:00 pm (our time) they switch to BBC News, which is no use at all (in more than one sense).

But I finally found a channel to listen to after that. It’s Jæren Misjonsradio (Jæren Mission Radio). If the name Jæren seems familiar, its old name is Jaeder, and it’s the region where Erling Skjalgsson lived in his time (around Stavanger). A region with a great evangelical tradition, of which my ancestors were a part.

They feature preaching in Norwegian, which is good. I recognize the Bible passages, and that helps me along. And the music they play is mostly in Norwegian too – and some of it’s quite excellent.

Today I heard one preacher – a good one – and happened to notice his name on the crawl. Carl Fredrik Wisløff. This was thrilling. Wisløff was a prominent evangelical preacher, teacher, and writer in Norway up to his death in 2004. I used to sell some of his books in the bookstore at the seminary – we had a large stock of one of them. He even visited our schools once, I’m told, but that was before my time.

Now, back to work.

Commitment (in two senses)

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Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev

I’m still keyed up about my sudden admittance to the ragged outskirts of the movie industry. For all I know, this translation experiment will be a failure, culminating in shame and derisive laughter. And yet it seems to be going pretty well so far. Which leads me to ponder, after the manner of a script doctor, where this plot line in my life started.

It was a summer in the 1970s. I’d recently graduated from college, though I was still living in an upstairs apartment on campus. The woman I had fallen in love with, more than any other before or since, had recently left the country. I had a strong feeling that I’d never see her again (I was almost right), and that I would be forever sad and alone (I nailed that one). So what was I to do with the shards of my hardly-begun life?

I resolved to do two things. I would write a novel, and I would learn Norwegian.

My true motive for writing the novel was (I’m pretty sure) to Show Her. I would be a great and famous literary figure, and she would kick herself for missing out on a good thing every time she saw me guesting on the Carson Show.

That didn’t work out very well. The novel would be finished – eventually – and it would be published, about 20 years later. But to date it has failed to make me a beloved cultural icon.

My motive for learning Norwegian, I think, was that I had a vague idea that someday I’d travel to Norway, where I’d meet a wonderful woman who’d be impressed that I spoke her language and make me forget my sorrows.

That hasn’t worked out very well either.

But I stuck with the plan, by gum. And now the two of them together have snagged me an interesting job.

At this point, I suppose, I should close with a hackneyed meditation on the importance of perseverance.

But that’s only one possible lesson. Another is a similarly hackneyed bromide: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.”

Fortunately, insanity is no handicap in the film industry.