Today I happened on a blog article titled “Why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn.” What a depressing headline for someone who has been trying to muddle her way through learning the language for over two years now.
The piece outlines in very clear grammatical terms why Norwegian ought to be the [...]
Last night we went to dinner with some friends at Lorry, Oslo’s version of The Ginger Man. While Lorry’s variety is nowhere near The Ginger Man’s, they do have over 120 types of beer (mostly bottled). That’s a very respectable offering for Norway, where it sometimes feels like every beer is a pilsner.
Since Purdue didn’t [...]
BeijEnglish – Special Norway Edition!
It’s not often that I see amusing English translations around here, since Norwegians seem to speak better English than I do!
However, I have been notice a few oddities around our canteen lately. Usually it’s just little things that are a bit off, and even when they’re fairly bizarre, you can [...]
On nice afternoons, we take a walk over to the shop next door to buy soda and ice cream. Today was especially lovely, so on the way back, we sat on the office steps to enjoy our snacks, basking in the spring sunshine and joking around. At some point, I happened to take a look [...]
I came up with a few interesting “Life in Norway” insights to share over the weekend, but I seem to have forgotten them. So instead, I’ll post another interesting link I’ve come across recently:
The World Accent Game
See how well you can identify speakers’ accents from all over the world.
I did surprisingly badly, though there were [...]
Floating around in my head, and slowly fading from memory, there are still a few classic tales from Beijing that I should really share.
One of the unintentionally funny things about our office in China is that the local Chinese employees were still a bit unsteady in their grasp of daily English usage. Their eagerness to [...]
Something has happened to my accent since I moved overseas, and lately a surprising number of people have identified it as Canadian (sorry, Kevin). While some of this might just be an effort to avoid offending me in case I’m not American* (in these days of bad US PR), some of them have been legitimate. Alas, there [...]
It’s time for my first “Little Things” post from Norway!
Today I tried to type something and couldn’t figure out why the computer’s auto-complete couldn’t figure out what I wanted. It turns out that I was trying to type something that starts with a Y by starting it with a J. Because that’s what J sounds [...]
I read an article last year that all the built-in security features like “SiteKey” images and the little lock icons in Internet Explorer are virtually worthless, because no one bothers to check for them. They did a study where they had people log in to their bank account websites multiple times, and they disabled some [...]
When I was growing up, Meg wasn’t all that common a name in the US. There were plenty of Megans but not a lot of Megs. I used to have to explain that it was “Just Meg. No ‘an.’” And all those little pseudo-personalized knick-knacks you love as a kid like bicycle license plates and [...]