Det var helt texas!

According to buzzfeed and tumblr, "texas" is used to mean something wild and crazy!

Apparently it comes from associations of the "wild west" and people's belief that all cowboys come from Texas. There's a lot of discussion around it, but it's really interesting to see how different aspects of culture get translated between languages.

The biggest problem with duo...?!

As with anything that is different to what came before, Duolingo has split the camp between lovers and haters. Some people swear by it, convinced that it is the only way to learn a language in the 21st century. Others see its bright colours and game-like approach as unserious, injecting too much fun at the expense of actual advancement in the language. Of the many arguments levelled against Duolingo though, one that keeps coming up time and time again is the fact that the sentences aren't useful for conversation, that phrases you need straight away come up later in the course or not at all and that the sentences that are there are often artificial or just plain weird.

Strange as some of them are, I actually don't see these as a drawback, in fact, I'd go as far to say that learning to translate such phrases as "the elephant drinks milk" etc goes a long way to making sure that the structures of the language themselves stick in your mind, rather than just learning rote phrases. Duolingo works by teaching you vocabulary then getting you to use it. This is different to how a phrasebook works, where you "learn" a phrase as a whole utterance, ready to be brought out when you need it in a specific context. At most, a space will be left blank to insert the noun you need, but besides this, it's a highly specific way of learning language that isn't encouraging you to actually make use of the language. The strange sentences often used by Duolingo work by encouraging you to instead take vocabulary out of isolation- they aren't specific to a certain situation. For example, instead of learning the phrase "jeg vil reise til Norge", you instead learn the words on their own, ready to be brought into various other sitautions. It might start off with "jeg vil reise til Norge" but before long it will be "katten vil reise med fly". It really doesn't matter that no cat on this Earth has ever thought to itself "I can't wait for the next time I go on a plane", the point is, it's asking you to create completely new sentences, using the vocabulary you have learnt and then manipulating it with the structures that you have picked up.

Duolingo does teach you enough to be able to order in a restaurant, book a hotel room and navigate the rail network, just not directly. It teaches you the vocabulary and the structures behind this, then it's up to you to put it together when you go on holiday. Here's the thing: studies have compared completing the Duolingo skill trees to the equivalent of a first year college level course. Now, how many people enroll on a college language course before their holidays? And how many college courses spend the first term role-playing restaurant scenarios? There are quicker ways to learn these things before your holiday, the fact is that Duolingo isn't for that purpose, it is to get you actually understanding the language and using it, not to prepare you for a weekend break in various European cities. Courses exist just for this purpose, and they're a lot better at it than Duolingo, but they won't bring you to B1 level.

Install and use a Norwegian keyboard on Windows

Once you've been learning for a while you are probably going to want to type the language at some point. This is always complicated by the fact that English is probably the ONLY language to use the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and nothing else. Every other language has at least one accent or diacritic to account for. Norwegian has three whole letters that don't appear on a standard keyboard. Luckily, in this day and age, it's actually pretty easy to install a keyboard layout and use it. The only tricky part is remembering the new layout. So here we go. For this article, I was using Windows 8, but the instructions are pretty standard throughout all Windows operating systems; I've been changing keyboards since XP and it's been the same throughout. However, for specific Windows 7 instructions, you can check out my guide for Czech I posted on an older blog a few years back.

Step 1: Locate the Control Panel

In Windows 8 you get there by dragging your mouse to the right edge of the screen and pull up the "charms". Settings is the bottom one and offers the option of the Control Panel. In all others the Control Panel is found through "My Computer" (and indeed is still there in Windows 8 as well). 

Step 2: Select the "Clock, Language, Region" Settings and go into "Language".

Select the option "Add Language".

Step 3: Select "Add a Language"(again)

Step 4: Scroll down the alphabetical list of languages and choose "norsk (bokmal)"...

... or nynorsk if you fancy. Then click on "Add".

Step 5: You're ready to go! To change keyboards, go down to the task bar and click on the "ENG". This is telling you your current language is English.

Step 6: Change your language by clicking on the (unfortunately labelled) "NOB" option. If you picked nynorsk earlier then I guess this will be "NON" for you.

Start typing!

A few points to remember

The Norwegian layout is similar to the English one with regards to letter placement, but punctuation is all over the place, as well as there now being three extra letters where we have the "[", ";" and "'" keys. See the diagram:

Take a minute to look at that, the punctuation throws me all the time. This is especially important when you're typing passwords! Remember to change back to your native language when typing these as it can just end up getting really frustrating the fifth time you carefully type it in only to realise the "@" sign is now typed with the "2" key. 

I hope this is helpful, I plan to do the same for iOS as well soon!

Why Norwegian?

With around 5 million speakers, Norwegian might seem a rather bizarre choice of language to learn, especially by someone who has never even been to Norway. Here, I give my reasons for picking Norwegian:

1. It is probably the easiest language for English speakers

We often hear about how German is so close to English, how the words are so similar and how, millennia ago, they were one and the same. I have always thought this was a bit of a far-fetched claim. Yes, they descend from the same ancestor but so what? Personally, I've always found French words reveal themselves much more readily than their German counterparts, probably because after the Norman conquest so much of our vocabulary was taken over as well. A few centuries before the Normans though, the Vikings took over large parts of England and gave us so many basic words. Are, cake, egg, till (unTIL), they... all these words come from Old Norse and are still recognisable in Norwegian. This, as well as the shared family background, means that such basic phrases as

Jeg kommer fra England

or

Norge er et nordisk, europeisk land

are readily understandable to an English speaker. The grammar of all the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish and Swedish) has followed a similar pattern to English: the declensions have been lost, the conjugations have been simplified and the old genitive is now a clitic 's' showing possession. Of course, there are many differences as well in areas such as word order, but personally I have found these a lot easier to cope with than the various differences between English and German. 

2. The Scandinavian languages are often described as "mutually intelligible".

I am not going to make the claim that it's three languages for the price of one, that would be vastly underestimating the differences between the three languages, but it is true that native speakers of the Scandinavian languages can understand each other to a great extent as they share a lot of vocabulary and the grammar is often very similar. Out of the three, it is the Norwegians who often understand the other two languages the best, as well as being better understood by the others than, say, a Swede understands a Dane. For a foreign learner, however, understanding spoken Danish is a whole other story! Nevertheless, you can often get a general idea of what a Swedish and Danish text is talking about from your knowledge of Norwegian. To get fluent, you will need to study them properly, of course, but Norwegian gives you the best foundation possible in them. Icelandic is, though, an entirely different ball game and you will basically be starting from scratch! 

3. Norway is one of the most beautiful destinations on Earth. 

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this one:

Geiranger

More of the famous Norwegian fjords

A Stave Church

Bergen

Stortinget- the Norwegian parliament- in Oslo

4. Learning about a different culture.

This is often the reason cited for learning a language and it's a great reason- no matter what language you study, you're being given the opportunity to see the world through new eyes. Norwegian is especially fascinating as a foreign language as it is at once an ancient and very modern country, in Europe but not in the EU, independent and the centre of the Viking world but experienced many years of foreign domination under the Swedes and Danes. Its history has affected the language as well- Bokmal, the most used of the official standards, derives to a large extent from Danish, which explains the similarity in writing, but it preserves the Norwegian pronunciation, which is closer to Swedish. Nynorsk, the other standard, is an attempt at preserving the dialects of the countryside and this debate between the two sides has driven Norwegian language policy. Norway gave us one of, if not the, greatest playwrights of the 19th century- Henrik Ibsen, as well as one of its greatest painters- Edvard Munch. With any language comes a wealth of memories and stories and Norwegian is no different. 

I hope this inspires you, if not to learn Norwegian then maybe to pick up another language just because you want to. All languages are worth studying no matter how small and especially with the Internet, language learning has never been more accessible.