Learn the Norwegian phrases for "to like," "to be tired," and "how"
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Gina:Hi, I am Gina. |
| Nora:And I am Nora. |
| Gina:And welcome back to NorwegianClass101.com. This is Beginner season 1, Lesson 14 -Talking About Your Job in Norwegian. |
| Nora:In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use the words å like |
| Gina:“To like” |
| Nora:And å være lei |
| Gina:“To be tired of” |
| Nora:You’ll also be learning about the word hvor meaning, “how”. |
| Gina:The conversation is between Kjersti and Espen. We’ll be hearing how Kjersti is feeling about her work. |
| Nora:It seems like there are some ups and downs. |
| POST CONVERSATION BANTER |
| Gina:So I hear that in Norway, it’s common to have a relaxed attitude towards work. |
| Nora:Yes! As we’ve said, a Norwegian’s happiness is measured by how much spare time they have. |
| Gina:Of course, there are those who love to work as well, or love their job. |
| Nora:It’s quite common in Norway, especially for people who live outside one of the major cities, to be engaged in fairly down-to-earth professions as well. |
| Gina:Yeah, like carpenters, mechanics, farmers, or even jobs in the local supermarket. |
| Nora:If you grow up in one of the major Norwegian cities, it’s more likely you’ll aim for higher education after high school. |
| Gina:In fact, most Norwegians are faced with career choices quite early on. |
| Nora:After junior high school, you select whether you want to enter a high school that focuses on generalised education, which sets you up with the qualifications required to continue to higher education. |
| Gina:Or whether you do specialised study at a high school, which puts you on track to becoming an apprentice in a more traditional profession. |
| Nora:High school is also optional to some degree in Norway. You can skip it if you want, but we don’t recommend this ofcourse! |
| KEY VOCAB AND PHRASES |
| Gina:Let’s take a closer look at some of the words and phrases from this lesson. Firstly, we’ll talk about one that is actually a verb and an adjective put together, but you’ll be learning them as a phrase as it is used a lot. |
| Nora:Yes, and it’s Å være lei. |
| Gina:It means “to be tired”. |
| Nora:It usually comes in conjunction with the adverb av |
| Gina:Which means “Of”. It works just like you’d use “of” in English. |
| Nora:Here’s an example - Jeg er lei av brød |
| Gina:It means “I am tired of bread”. |
| Nora:It’s fairly simple, but if you want to add some adverbs to this phrase, like our sample sentence, you need to put it in between the verb å være. |
| Gina:Meaning “to be” In English. |
| Nora:And the adjective lei. |
| Gina:Which means “Tired”. Let’s look at some examples. |
| Nora:Jeg er veldig lei for det. |
| Gina:“I am very sorry about that.” |
| Nora:Hun var lei av den samme maten hver dag. |
| Gina:“She was tired of having the same food every day” |
| Nora:Good! We’ll also look at the word mye |
| Gina:Which means “much”. This is quite simple. |
| Nora:There is another word, mange |
| Gina:Which means “Many”, and like in English these two shouldn’t be confused. |
| Nora:But just to be clear, mye is used when we are talking about something that isn’t countable or abstract. Like snø. |
| Gina:“Snow”. |
| Nora:While mange is used when what we’re talking about is countable, such as epler. |
| Gina:“Apples”. Ok, now let’s look at some examples. |
| Nora:Så mye sand det er her. |
| Gina:“There’s so much sand here” |
| Nora:Det er mye som foregår på en gang, nå. |
| Gina:“There’s a lot simultaneously happening now.” Okay, now onto the grammar. |
Lesson focus |
|---|
| Gina:The focus of this lesson is “to like”, “to be tired” and “how”. So in this lesson we’ll look at how to talk about work, life and in general likes and dislikes. |
| Nora:We’ll also look at the word hvor and how it changes depending on the context. |
| Gina:We covered this word in earlier lessons. |
| Nora:So we’ll be elaborating on what we’ve learned so far in this lesson. |
| Gina:But first of all, let’s look at how the sentence in the dialogue is constructed. |
| Nora:The sentence was Jeg liker hvor utfordrende det er, men jeg er lei av stresset. |
| Gina:This sentence roughly translates as “I like how challenging it can be, but I am tired of the stress.” Now let’s break this sentence down. |
| Nora:First we have the pronoun jeg. |
| Gina:Or “I” in English. It’s followed by the present tense of the verb... |
| Nora:Å like, conjugated to liker. |
| Gina:“To like”. Then we have... |
| Nora:Hvor, which means “where”. |
| Gina:Or in this instance “how”. We’ll look at why, later. |
| Nora:After that, we have the adjective fleksibel. |
| Gina:Which is similar to its English counterpart “flexible”. |
| Nora:Then we have the pronoun jeg again. This is followed by the modal verb kan. |
| Gina:Which means “can”, and it modifies the verb... |
| Nora:...Å være. or “to be”. After the comma follows the conjunction men. |
| Gina:Which means “but”. Then we have the pronoun jeg, again. |
| Nora:Followed by the present tense of the verb å være, which is er, |
| Gina:Or “is” in English. |
| Nora:Then comes the adjective lei. |
| Gina:Meaning “Tired” or “sad”. |
| Nora:Then the preposition av. This means “of”. |
| Gina:And finally the defined noun. |
| Nora:Stresset which translates as “The stress” |
| Gina:The way this sentence is constructed is a little too complex, so we’re not really going to look at how it is done. |
| Nora:But to better understand it, we’ll look at the two main points of this sentence. Jeg liker and jeg er lei. |
| Gina:Since we’ll end with explaining the word |
| Nora:hvor |
| Gina:and since it connects with the former |
| Nora: jeg liker |
| Gina:let’s first start by explaining |
| Nora: jeg er lei. |
| Nora:Jeg er lei is a common phrase, as we saw in the vocab explanation, and since we explained the meaning there, let’s focus on the surrounding words. The first word after the comma is men which means “but”. |
| Gina:This implies that whatever comes after is probably not positive, especially since the first part of the sentence is. |
| Nora:In a later lesson we’ll look at how men works in longer sentences. Now with the phrase jeg er lei, a very common word to connect the phrase with the rest of the sentence with is av, which means “of”. |
| Gina:This works much like the English “I am tired of”. |
| Nora:It’s also very common to put nouns or pronouns after this, or after the phrase itself. |
| Gina:You can also add adverbs in between, to make the sentence even more elaborate. Let’s look at some examples of this... |
| Nora:Jeg er lei av alt bråket utenfor. |
| Gina:"I am tired of all the noise outside." |
| Nora:Jeg er lei alle telefonene jeg får på jobben. |
| Gina:“I am tired of all the phone conversations at my job.” As you can see it’s quite simple. |
| Nora:Here we added alt. |
| Gina:Which means “all” in simple neuter form. |
| Nora:And bråket, which means “noise” in defined form after the phrase in the first example. |
| Gina:In the second example, we added |
| Nora:alle |
| Gina:which means “all” in plural form. |
| Nora:And telefonene which means “phone” in plural defined form. Next we have the jeg liker. |
| Gina:This phrase works a bit differently from the phrase |
| Nora: jeg er lei |
| Gina:That’s because this phrase only consists of a pronoun and a verb. |
| Nora:So you can’t use the av meaning “of” after the phrase. |
| Gina:But you can add pronouns and nouns after the phrase. |
| Nora:What was special in our dialogue though, is that we added the interrogative hvor meaning “where”. |
| Gina:In English this doesn’t make much sense, but |
| Nora:hvor |
| Gina:in Norwegian has a few different uses depending on context and which words surround it. |
| Nora:In our previous series, we explained that hvor coupled with mye or mange or many other adverbs would change it to “how”, “how much”, “how many” etc. |
| Gina:Now for our dialogue you can alter the sentence to include an adverb. |
| Nora:Jeg liker hvor veldig fleksibel... |
| Gina:It means “I like how very flexible...” And immediately the reason we use |
| Nora:hvor |
| GIna:starts to become more obvious. Let’s just look at a few more examples of this. |
| Nora:Jeg liker hvor frisk luften er her. |
| Gina:“I like how fresh the air is here.” |
| Nora:Hun likte hvor utrolig snill han var. |
| Gina:“She liked how incredibly kind he was.” |
Outro |
| Nora:That’s it for this lesson. Take a listen again if you didn’t catch everything. |
| Gina:Also feel free to leave feedback in the comments, and make sure you check the lesson notes! |
| Nora:See you next time! |
| Gina:Thanks for listening, bye! |
| Nora:Ha det! |
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