Friday, July 23, 2010

Common Expressions

In my Norwegian class one day we learned some common expressions and sayings. After all the work they had us go through to learn the different tenses of verbs, that day we found out that if the verb is obvious, it can just be skipped altogether.




Why in the world would it be okay to leave out a key element in a sentence? The only thing that made sense was something my husband, Kory, told me one time. As a kid, when he sat down at the dinner table, he was required to be silent so his parents could talk. He thought he wasn’t allowed to speak because there must be only so many words that could come out of his mouth in a lifetime, and that he wasn’t supposed to use them all up as a child…. Such is the logic of his young mind, but I have no idea behind the logic in the rule of leaving out the verb.



It’s very weird to hear someone say, “I can Norwegian,” (“Jeg kan norske.”) It’s allowed to leave out the verb “speak” because it’s obvious what goes there (more obvious to some than others, I suppose). So it’s possible to hear people say things like, “I will the store” or “I must to class.” Why not just say “GO” right in there with the sentence, as it’s not a very big word, even in Norwegian? But then, Norwegians are known to be quite the conservers. They don’t even waste a breath, as they often talk while sucking in air.



It’s common when talking to someone, that they make a sound like they just choked on something. They suck in a breath at the same time they say, “Ja” (“yes”). It’s as if what they are agreeing to couldn’t even wait until their next breath was taken and their comment has to come out immediately. I don’t get it, but then I don’t get a lot of things Norwegian - like the expression, “Kan du slå på tråden?” Word for word that is translated as, “Can you hit me with a thread?” or “Can you punch me with a string?” – it could go either way as the words used mean both things. That’s the literal translation, but the meaning is something that could never be guessed: “Can you give me a call?”



I’m sure there are weird English expressions we have as well, but since I’m so used to them they don’t exactly come to mind. “Can you hit me with a thread?” Where do they come up with this stuff?

Friday, July 16, 2010

Newspapers

Reading the newspaper in Norway is right up there with talking about the weather or complaining about taxes. I read a travel book of Norway while on the ferry one day– it was translated to English and it highlighted every town along the coast. Each city’s description started off like this: Aalesund, population: 40,000; newspaper subscriptions: 38,000. Several cities had nearly as many newspaper subscribers as they have residents.




I thought about that for a while and wondered how that could be since children wouldn’t be subscribers... but then I figured it out. In our city alone there were no less than four major newspapers, two local ones and two national ones. Everyone I know reads two or three of them a day. It’s the national pass-time.



The newspapers in Norway aren’t anything at ALL like the American ones where the motto is “If it bleeds, it leads.” In fact, Norwegian newspapers are mostly human interest stories (somewhat like the LaConner Weekly News!) and the bad news is buried somewhere in the middle and not at all highlighted. Norwegians don’t like to hear bad news.



There are very few advertisements in Norwegian papers (the bulk of the pages have no ads whatsoever) and they are all in full color – every page. Of course, each paper costs about four dollars a day, but people still buy them and read nearly every word. They report on even the slightest of details.



Norway doesn’t have the censorship in newspapers like they do in America. They don’t omit a word, and swear words are often in the headlines. (They actually HAVE freedom of speech in Norway as no one can lose a job or get sued for something they say.) They also have at least one naked body picture a week in the paper, as nudity in Norway means nothing. It’s just the human body and they don’t have any modesty when it comes to that (that was a little hard to get used to).



On the whole, newspapers are pretty interesting as they highlight a lot of local people and what they are doing in their jobs or with their spare time. I’m sure everyone that lives in Norway has been written up in the newspaper more than once in their lifetime. I guess it’s the way Norwegians feel connected to one another, without actually having to talk to each other and dare risk sharing their feelings.

Taxes

Every job in Norway pays a livable wage. I could have gotten a job flipping burgers for twenty eight dollars an hour. It’s not the money that attracts people to jobs, it’s the job itself. People end up doing what they really want to do for a living – not doing something just for money. (That concept is NOT American.) Recently Norway reduced their maximum tax bracket from 92% to 50% so now there is starting to be more diversity in standard of living. It used to be everyone was taxed in such a way that they all took home about the same amount.




Most people working full time make around fifty grand a year and nearly half of that goes to taxes. One of the national pastimes is complaining about taxes, but Norwegians all live upper-middle class lives compared to Americans. Many have cabins, all go on nice vacations, most drive new cars, and everyone has a decent house. Go figure. But Norwegians actually get something for the taxes they pay. They have no medical insurance premiums and minimal medical expenses ($150 per year). They have no property taxes. They don’t have to save for retirement or pay for their children’s education as those are provided for by the government, and they don’t have to worry about becoming disabled because Norway pays well for disabilities. When I think about where the bulk of our money goes in America, I worry about the rising costs of medical expenses and insurance, Kaleb’s college fund, and property taxes. No such worries plague Norwegians.



Income tax isn’t the only source of revenue in Norway, however. Sales tax is 26% on everything, including food, but it’s built into the price, so there is no math to do before going to the cash register. New cars have a 100% sales tax and most things brought in from outside Norway have a 300% import tax (which is most everything and why it’s so expensive to live there.)



I read in a Norwegian newspaper that the leading cause of death is cardiovascular related - a whopping 39% of deaths are from that and another 25% are from cancer. That’s 64% of people in Norway dying from either heart attacks or cancer, and while that seems incredibly high – the average age of death in Norway is 78 - so the bulk of those deaths are from old people. And if the only sure things in life are death and taxes, it’s guaranteed that if the taxes in Norway kill you, they will also pay for your funeral.

Sentence Structures

The Good Teacher Inga asked me one day to tell our entire Norwegian class what I did on Saturday – in Norwegian, of course. It was a humbling experience. I know many verbs. I know a lot of nouns. I even know all the pronouns in objective and subjective form. I know how to say nouns as singular or plural. I know how to say verbs past tense or present tense, but I have yet to figure out how to form a proper sentence.




When I was learning Spanish in college, the big thing to remember was the adjective comes after the noun – they don’t say “green tree” – they say “tree green.” If only Norwegian could be that simple. They have all kinds of things mixed up. Their “the”s come after the noun (“tree the”) the negative comes after the verb (“married NOT”), and the second word in the sentence always HAS to be a verb. Their word order (sentence structure) is completely different than English and even now I’m still clueless.



Whenever I write something down and read it to Kory he reminds me I can’t just take an English sentence word for word and translate it to Norwegian – I have to translate the entire sentence and “think like a Norwegian.” OK, “I have it out figured NOT.” Lord help me the day I start thinking like the Norwegians!



I do get a kick out of some of the words Norwegians use to name things though. You can clearly see their thinking when (translated) they named a pencil sharpener a “pencil eater,” and an eraser a “learning wash.”



When we sing songs in church, they will have a song on the overhead with words that have just one to three letters in them – jeg, vil, liv, får, håp, alt, meg, gud, så, med, du, i, å, det, om… so many small words that mean so much. But when I go to school, I see words that should be an entire sentence in themselves – like “voksenopplæringssenter,” which translated means “the grown-up people’s higher learning center.”



I guess the Norwegian’s solution to the dilemma I face, is to combine all the complicated words into just one word rather than to try and figure out where all those words would go in the sentence. Maybe I should start thinking like a Norwegian after all.