Learn some more subtle tips about semantics and how to form longer sentences
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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 18 - How Long Until You Arrive in Norway? In this lesson you’ll learn how to form longer sentences. |
| Nora:Following on from our previous lesson, we’ll see how the longer sentences are structured. |
| Gina:We’re especially focusing on where longer pauses come in. |
| Nora:In our dialogue, we’ll hear Lars asking Kjersti when she arrives in the capital, Oslo. |
| Gina:Lars is going to meet her to help her around the city as she runs her errands. Okay, let's listen to the conversation. |
| POST CONVERSATION BANTER |
| Gina:It’s quite common to visit Oslo for just about every Norwegian, isn’t it? |
| Nora:Well at least if you live fairly close to the capital. Most Norwegian cities, suburbs, and small towns are lacking in some aspect. |
| Gina:So going to visit the capital becomes something of a pilgrimage for many. |
| Nora:In the capital, you can shop, experience, sight-see, meet friends who “moved to the city”, and of course experience vibrant city life. |
| Gina:If you ever visit Oslo and other parts of Norway, you’ll quickly notice the difference between the capital and the other cities. |
| Nora:Yes, while Trondheim, Bergen, Tromsø, Tønsberg and Stavanger are all places with wider cultural diversity, landmarks, and something more to offer, none of them are as compelling as the capital. |
| Gina:Of course this varies between people, but there does seem to be agreement that Oslo is the heart of Norway. |
| Nora:It makes sense - it is the capital after all! |
| Gina:Definitely. |
| KEY VOCAB AND PHRASES |
| Gina:Let’s take a closer look at some of the words and phrases from this lesson. |
| Nora:First up, the word vel can mean different things depending on the context. |
| Gina:Yes. It can be “Well” or “Good” as in... |
| Nora:Jeg er vel. |
| Gina:Which means “I am well”. |
| Nora:Then we have “Probably” as in det går vel bra. |
| Gina:“It’s probably ok”. And finally “Well” as in the interjection... |
| Nora:Vel, det har ikke så mye å si. |
| Gina:“Well, it doesn’t have that much to say.” |
| Nora:While you might be inclined to think of it as an interjection, just be careful in the scenarios where it would mean “probably”. |
| Gina:Let’s look at a few examples of it as the word “probably”. |
| Nora:Hun kommer vel i morgen. |
| Gina:“She’s probably coming tomorrow.” |
| Nora:Han sa vel ikke noe om meg? |
| Gina:“He didn’t say anything about me, did he?” |
| Nora:Next we have the word når. |
| Gina:It means “when” and is a conjunction. More specifically, it’s a conjunction dealing with time. |
| Nora:A common mistake for Norwegians is to mix når with the other time related conjunction da which means “then”. |
| Gina:This is hard to imagine at first, but looking at a sentence like this... |
| Nora:Da jeg var liten. |
| Gina:Which translates to “when I was little” it’s more obvious why it’s confusing. |
| Nora:If you still don’t get it, når translates as “when” and in the sentence we just mentioned da also translated as “when”. |
| Gina:In Norway there’s a saying that goes... |
| Nora:Den gang da, hver gang når. |
| Gina:If we try to translate that it becomes, “that time then, every time when”. |
| Nora:In other words you only use når when you talk about something occurring often, and da when talking about something that happened once. |
| Gina:Let’s look at some examples of this. |
| Nora:Når jeg spiser ris blir jeg fort mett. |
| Gina:“When I eat rice I quickly get full.” |
| Nora:Da jeg spiste ris ble jeg fort mett. |
| Gina:“When I ate rice I quickly started to feel full.” |
| Nora:Sounds good. |
| Gina:Okay, now onto the grammar. |
Lesson focus |
|---|
| Gina:In this lesson, you’ll learn about longer sentence structures. |
| Nora:We’ll continue on from our last lesson, where we looked at longer sentences and a few words. |
| Gina:In this lesson we’ll be focusing on the structure of longer sentences. We’ll start by breaking down two sentences from our dialogue. |
| Nora:It was Jeg har ikke ankommet enda. Jeg er der om en time. |
| Gina:This roughly translates as “I haven’t arrived yet. I’ll be there in an hour.” |
| Nora:If we look at this word for word, we see that jeg... |
| Gina:The pronoun “I”, is the first word. |
| Nora:This is followed by the present tense of the verb å ha, which is har. |
| Gina:“To have” in English. |
| Nora:Then we have the negative ikke |
| Gina:Which means “not”. This is followed by the past tense of the verb... |
| Nora:Å ankomme, and conjugated it is ankommet. |
| Gina:“To arrive” in English. |
| Nora:Then we have the adverb enda, which means “yet”. |
| Gina:This completes one sentence. The next sentence starts with the pronoun... |
| Nora:Jeg. |
| Gina:“I”, again. It’s followed by the present tense of the verb |
| Nora:Å være, conjugated er. |
| Gina:Which means “to be”. Next we have the adverb |
| Nora:Der or “there”. This is followed by the preposition om. |
| Gina:Which means “in”. |
| Nora:And finally we have the noun for time |
| Gina:“Hour” it’s undefined, thus it is preceded by its article en meaning “an” or “one”. |
| Nora:All in all, we have Jeg har ikke ankommet enda. Jeg er der om en time. |
| Gina:And now that you know word by word what it means, you have probably noticed that the sentence translates directly into English without a problem. |
| Nora:Why is that? Let’s analyze this. |
| Gina:As you know by now, Norwegian is a Subject Verb Object language just like English. |
| Nora:This means that we always start with the subject of the sentence, then we move on to the verb, and then the object or thing that the subject performs the verb with. |
| Gina:In longer sentences, these word orders repeat themselves. Let’s look at the structure of this sentence. |
| Nora:Jeg is the subject of the sentence. |
| Gina:It could be replaced by just about any pronoun or noun. |
| Nora:This is followed by the auxiliary verb har which followed by the modifier ikke - an adverb, and finally the verb of the sentence, ankommet. |
| Gina:The auxiliary verb is necessary to mark present perfect tense, and the negative ikke makes the verb a negative, as in, not performed the verb. |
| Nora:Finally we have the adverb enda which modifies time. |
| Gina:Now you may notice that we are missing an essential part of the sentence here, namely the object. The reason it’s missing is that it’s understood through the context of the sentence. If we were to include the object, the sentence would look like this... |
| Nora:Jeg har ikke ankommet i Oslo enda. |
| Gina:Here you can see that Oslo is placed as the object after the verb. The time-modifying adverb comes after the Object. |
| Nora:In the sentence that follows we have a Subject Verb Object again. Jeg is the Subject. Then the Verb er. It’s followed by the Object der. |
| Gina:Finally we have a time modification. This is actually strictly part of the Object “part” of the sentence. And that’s it. Now, let’s look at the other sentence we had. |
| Nora:Kjersti, du er vel ikke i Oslo allerede? |
| Gina:This roughly translates as “Kjersti, you haven’t arrived in Oslo already?” Let’s look at it word by word. |
| Nora:First we have the personal noun, Kjersti. |
| Gina:This is followed by a comma, and the pronoun du which means “you”. |
| Nora:Then we have a verb in present tense er, from å være |
| Gina:Which means “to be”. Then we have the adverb... |
| Nora:Vel or “well”. This is followed by the negative ikke |
| Gina:Which you should know by now - it means “not”. |
| Nora:Next we have the preposition i or “in”. |
| Gina:Then the place noun, Oslo. And finally the time modifying adverb again... |
| Nora:Allerede. |
| Gina:It sounds a lot like “already”, right? So, in this case we have a question, and as you might remember; questions follow a different structure: Verb Subject Object. |
| Nora:This is not always the case though. |
| Gina:True, like in this sentence the question is a closed question, so it works more like a sentence with an open end. |
| Nora:It starts with the Subject which is Kjersti, du. |
| Gina:Two words in this case, and one is simply pointing out the listener while the following is the defining subject. |
| Nora:This is followed by the Verb of the sentence, er. |
| Gina:And then comes the part of the sentence which doesn’t translate well directly to English. |
| Nora:Exactly. Whenever a verb is paired with the negative ikke, ikke should be placed after the first part of the verb. |
| Gina:The second rule at work here is that adverbs like vel, which has the connotation of “probably” or “possibly”, are always placed before the negative. |
| Nora:So har, the auxiliary verb, vel the adverb, and ikke the negative. In that order. |
| Gina:After this comes the object of the sentence, i Oslo. |
| Nora:Unlike the sentence before, Oslo has to be preceded by the preposition i. |
| Gina:Yes, as you might remember, i was optional in the sentence above. |
| Nora:This is because the verb å ankomme doesn’t seem to need it. Now finally in this sentence we have another time-modifying adverb allerede. |
| Gina:These adverbs at the end of the sentences always tell us what time our sentence relates to. |
| Nora:Let’s see how we can change some of the words in our two sentences to give it new meaning. |
| Gina:Yes, let’s look at some examples. Note we only switch out the words here, the word positions don’t change. |
| Nora:Jeg drar ikke nå. Jeg skal i møtet om to timer. |
| Gina:"I am not going now. I am going to the meeting in two hours." |
| Nora:Ole! Dere har vel ankommet Kiel innen nå? |
| Gina:“Ole! You guys have probably arrived in Kiel by now?” |
| Nora:Alright! That was a lot to process. |
Outro |
| Gina:Ok, that’s all for this lesson. |
| Nora:Definitely listen again if you didn’t catch some of it. |
| Gina:And as always, it also helps to read the lesson notes. |
| Nora:See you next time! |
| Gina:Thanks for listening, bye! |
| Nora:Ha det! |
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