I’m a little bit disappointed in that Danish was not included in the official or beta languages, but Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish are. I read the requirements for introducing a new language. Five hours for each level is a lot!
I’m just complaining, using this forum as an outlet for venting. I live in Sweden, and have a fairly good grasp with Swedish. Learning Danish and Norwegian would also be beneficial regarding marketability. I thought maybe it’d be easy to gather the required material, but it’s not as easy as one would think. The public radio stuff might be an avenue. I think they would definitely give their permission, but most of everything else is privately created, and I don’t know any native speakers. Maybe if I meet one, I could talk them into creating lessons for free – fifteen hours worth!
Well, I have heard and/or read people say that Finland is a Scandinavian county it seems to be a common misconception but to be precise Finland is a Nordic country. I probably shouldn’t get so worked up about it but it is a small pet peeve of mine.
Yes, I misspoke. I should have said all the Nordic languages, but no Danish (I don’t care about Faroese.) But now I’m also dismayed that they don’t offer Icelandic. I suppose my only consolation is that unless I live in Denmark or Iceland, then I probably would never have any use for it.
I guess what I’ll have to do is use Learning with Texts as the primary tool for Danish. Then I’ll work on gathering those fifteen hours of audio/texts for the rest of ya!
That would be awesome. Danish is the most attractive nordic language for me because it is the most different and sounds so weird. It would be fun to learn. I would go for it if it was added.
Bigger question: To what degree are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian Intelligible? There is barely any content for Norwegian. Is Swedish understood in Norway?
My Swedish is very bad. But I was able to have some conversations with a Norwegian. It’s no wonder he could understand me, but I could understand him, too.
“Dude, can you please add some Finnish content to lingq?” sadly no. For what it is worth altough you might already know this but Yle has a similar podcast to RFI:s français facile called Yle Uutiset selkosuomeksi. Yle publishes these every day and they are about 4-5 minutes in length. The archives goes as far as one and a half month.
I know your question is more about Norway, but since you asked about all three … I would say that Danish is not at all understandable by the Swedes. Reading text is probably easier, but certainly not speaking. I do not know anyone who understands the spoken language, but then again - I don’t know a whole lot of people!
I cannot speak for the Danes as a whole as to how they perceive Swedish, but we had a Danish vet who thought I was a native Swede during a phone conversation. I understood some of her Danish (since I had studied it some years back), but it became clear that she had made the effort to “Swedify” her Danish. It was still very exhausting to listen to, and upon subsequent visits, I had to request that she speak English.
Thanks. I have heard that Danish is just speaking Norwegian with a potato in your mouth. I assumed it would be easier. I also wish that there was more Norwegian content. There is hardly anything there I have gone through all of the beginner stuff already. I suppose I could just go with swedish though.
I could add some lessons in Belarusian one by one with voices of my family members. But it looks unreal to collect all 2+5+5 hours at once. It does not motivate to create a content just for collection hoping to add it onto the site one day.
Can’t think of any. My strategy with Serbian right now is to learn a lot of vocabulary and then later I will start listening to the radio to get the pronounciation down.
