 |
| My first passport. |
For me, a former language teacher, there's nothing more humbling than studying a language I thought I already knew.
Family lore says that I spoke three languages before kindergarten: Norwegian, German, and English. In my birth home, Oslo, in my father's parents' home, I was surrounded by Norwegian. Then I lived with my German grandparents in Stuttgart, and German came naturally. During my English-speaking growing-up years in the Chicago area, I often returned to both sets of grandparents and the languages of my earliest years.
Roughly seven decades later, I don't have the same level of confidence at all with those first two languages. So now, long after my language-learning window has closed, neurologically speaking, I'm determined to get some of that confidence back. At least in Norwegian.
Well, I do have a head start, a passive knowledge of probably several hundred words. (Just for context, and humility ... according to Google, the average English speaker knows 20-40,000 words, and even a five-year old might know 5,000!)
Continuing the theme of head start and humility, a whole bunch of those several hundred words are cognates or near-cognates:
- a ball - en ball
- a bank - en bank
- a boat - en båt
- a book - ei bok
- a bush - en busk
- a cake - ei kake
- a cat - ei katt
- a clock - en klokke
- a cow - ei ku
- a daughter - ei datter
- a day - en dag
- a door - ei dør
- a fish - en fisk
- a flag - et flagg
- a garage - et garasje
- a glass - et glass
- a goat - ei geit
- a hammer - en hammer
- a house - et hus
- a night - en natt
- a plant - en plante
- a sea - en sjø
- a ship - et skip
- a son - en sønn
- a tree - et tre
- a window - et vindu
- grass - gress
- paper - papir
Almost as close:
- an airplane - et fly
- a brother - en bror
- a dog - en hund (compare English hound)
- an enemy - en fiende (compare English fiend)
- a father - en far
- a horse - en hest
- a place - et sted (as in English bedstead, homestead, instead of)
- a morning - en morgen
- a mother - ei mor
- a shirt - en skjorte
- a sister - ei søster
- a skirt - et skjørt
- a stone - en stein
- a word - et ord
- environment - miljø (compare with milieu)
- food - mat (compare with English meat, which once meant food in general)
- hi! - hei!
- goodbye! - adjø! (compare French adieu!)
See how much Norwegian you and I already know?! And don't those words sound sort of like an echo of an ancient form of English? Thanks to Bnorsk.no for many of these examples and many other cognates (verbs, adjectives, etc.) you can find there.
My head start only goes so far; it disappears when I start dealing with a noun's gender. Some Norwegians divide all nouns into two genders, common and neuter. But others prefer to observe the division of common nouns into masculine with the indefinite article "en" (a son - en sønn) or feminine with the indefinite article "ei" (a book - ei bok). In any case, I need to learn the noun's article along with the noun.
To compensate, Norwegian verbs don't conjugate according to subject or pronoun. Whew!
I'm delicately skipping over the subjects of pronunciation and tonality.
I have two different ways of working with my remnant of passive Norwegian. I read textbooks of varying difficulty (such as the three pictured above) and Web sites such as ntnu.edu/now; I enjoy the little bursts of pleasure that I get when I realize that I understand the texts, either by knowing the full words or by recognizing the root words and the word-units in compound words, allowing me to guess their meanings. Context helps, too; I'm more likely to understand political and theological texts than, for example, poetry. It's fun to pick and choose among the various methods and levels of those different resources rather than just sticking to one of them.
This works for increasing my reading and vocabulary abilities. However, I need more help with listening comprehension (this is the area we focused on when we lived in Russia, teaching English) and much more help in speaking. For that, I abandon all pretense of being an advanced learner, and drill myself in the very basics, using Duolingo. I patiently work through exercise after exercise of speaking into the microphone when so instructed, patiently constructing sentences with the right word order, and reviewing my mistakes. Note to self: the word "my" comes after that noun that is mine.
 |
| My grandmother Gerd Jakobsen Maurer. Above her, my great-great grandfather Johan Fredrik Maurer. |
There's a practical side to this activity, aside from the alleged benefit in preventing or postponing Alzheimer's disease: in a month I plan to be attending the combined Nordic Yearly Meeting in Stavanger, Norway. It will serve as an exam of sorts, and already serves as powerful motivation.
But the best part of these efforts is the way I feel reconnected to my fascinating and very literate grandmother, with whom I spent many hours in conversation from my first years until her death in 1988.
The photo of my grandmother comes from this post back in 2005. I still see her and my grandfather in my dreams ... where they're usually speaking English, which they both spoke very well.
Another advantage of immersing myself in relearning a language: a respite from the day's news.
There's no respite in Ukraine.
Timothy Snyder on the reasons he moved to Toronto last year (and things that were not reasons).
Walter Brueggemann died today. The news and the legacy. Rest in peace!
Michael Marsh invites us to think about our deathbed prayer. (Not a morbid post at all.)
Britain Yearly Meeting's 2025 epistle ... "We are reminded that the central message of the New Testament is one of love." Good, I think so, too, but Mark Russ has a caution.
Three more days to register for the annual sessions of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. Location: Reedwood Friends Church, across the street from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. (Online attendance is possible for the main sessions and some of the workshops.)
Austin John, "Long Distance Call." (The whole set is excellent.)
No comments:
Post a Comment