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.