Challenges

The Good Teacher Inga never taught us on Fridays because she taught English to another class, so we always had a substitute teacher on those days. We had one substitute named Lidia, for several weeks in a row. She is from Russia and I have tremendous respect for her because she started teaching Norwegian after only having lived in Norway for a few years. She is gifted in the language department. She speaks English perfectly, as well as French and Spanish, Russian and Norwegian.




We didn’t have any native French speakers in our class, but we sure had Spanish and Russian speakers, so she was quite the hit with all of us. She was teaching us one day about the rules involved with prepositional phrases and we all sat there with a blank look on our face. When the light bulb finally clicked for me, I asked her, in English, if what I thought was correct. She answered back in English. Then a Russian woman fired off a whole string of questions and they went back and forth like lightening in Russian. Then the Spanish speakers spoke up and she answered them just as quickly, in Spanish. Finally, we all understood what she was trying to tell us in Norwegian. She was amazing. It’s not that we didn’t understand her Norwegian, we just didn’t understand why in the world the Norwegian language would have such crazy rules about prepositional phrases. (I’m sure most of the class didn’t even know what a prepositional phrase was, even in their own language.)



I’m sure the best training ground these Norwegians have for setting world records and winning so many Olympic gold medals, is the fact that as children, they’ve all had to learn to speak Norwegian.



When my dad was a little boy, he was quite mischievous and my grandma used to say, “If he lives to be five, he’ll live a lifetime.” (And he did.) I feel the same way about Norwegian. Norwegian parents must say, “If they can learn to speak Norwegian, they can do ANYTHING!” (And they do.)