The piece outlines in very clear grammatical terms why Norwegian ought to be the easiest language for English-speakers to learn.  It talks about how English speakers have all the advantages of a similar vocabulary, English-like word order, and other grammatical parallels between the two languages.  While all this is true (and I do appreciate the familiar vocabulary), I’ve unfortunately found that word order and grammar are an extremely small part of having a practical knowledge of a foreign language.

In my opinion, pronunciation may be the single most important factor in learning a second language.  I have a feeling the original article targets only the written language, in which case pronunciation is a moot point, but the link I followed was from a travel blog, and travelers may find it difficult to depend on written language alone.  Of course it is possible, and I carried around a pen and paper in China for just this purpose (since my Japanese background meant I had an extra written vocabulary at my disposal), but if you’re going to resort to pen and ink, pictograms will probably get you even farther anyway!

Take, for example, the widespread internet meme:

I can has cheeseburger?

If you show up at a McDonald’s in any English-speaking country and ask, “I can has cheeseburger?” the person working the counter will probably give you a cheeseburger and point to the total on the cash register.  Success!  Sure, the word order was wrong, the subject-verb agreement was wrong, etc.  But you got the point across, and when you’re learning another language, successful communication is usually the ultimate goal.

Now imagine that you show up at the same McDonald’s after studying the English language extensively and say (phonetically):

Cowled I plessa hayva aah keysburjur?
["Could I please have a cheeseburger?" pronounced incorrectly]

I’m pretty sure you’d just get a confused look.  Assuming you managed to understand (or ignore) the first part of the sentence, what the heck is a “keysburjur?”  Okay, so using a hard K sound for “ch” may be a little extreme, but often I hear that soft G popping up unexpectedly among non-native English speakers.  So even if you get the grammar perfect, there’s still a pretty good chance that no one will understand you if you bungle the pronunciation.

And therein lies the first (and perhaps greatest) challenge of learning Norwegian.  It has one more thing in common with English, and that is its occasionally unintuitive phonetics.  (Please, someone, explain to me how “ky” can sound so much more like she than key?!)  No matter how much vocabulary you learn and how many irregular verbs you memorize, if no one knows that you’re trying to say you want chicken (“kylling”) it doesn’t really matter that you conjugated the verb right.

Now throw in the myriad dialects that are spoken all over Norway, and you have a daunting task indeed.  Even if you ignore the fact that they managed to develop two completely different Norwegian languages (Bokmål and Nynorsk),  the regional dialects can vary so much that Norwegians may have trouble even understanding each other.

Lastly, the single biggest barrier to learning Norwegian is the very same point the author makes for it being easy.  With so many similarities between Norwegian and English, most Norwegians speak almost perfect textbook English.  Add in the abundance of spoken English in American and British films, TV, and music, and you have 5 million Norwegians who speak English almost as well as I do!  This doesn’t create an environment conducive to learning the local language.

I often compare our time in Norway to our (much shorter) time in China.  In Beijing, where almost no one spoke English, without at least a few words of spoken Mandarin, you would probably end up starving to death (or find yourself confined to your apartment, subsisting on home-delivered pasta from Annie’s).  “Not dying” is a pretty good motivator for learning a language!  In Norway, on the other hand, you can find food, get around, and do just about anything you need to do without speaking the language at all.  All you need to do is ask someone (in English) for help, and you’re set.  Of course it may require a little lateral thinking (i.e. if someone at the grocery doesn’t understand “corn starch,” you can fall back on “the stuff you put in sauce to make it thicker”), but 95% of the time, there’s no problem at all.

This also returns to the pronunciation issue.  Norwegians speak fantastic English, and we fumbling Norwegian students speak terrible Norwegian.  Many Norwegians find it much easier to simply switch to English when they’re having trouble understanding a strange accent, thus foiling our attempts to practice.  Norway hands (can I coin that phrase?) will always tell you that the best response is to keep plowing on in Norwegian or to just tell the person that you’d prefer they speak Norwegian, but when you just want to buy a quick cheeseburger, it seems a little like overkill.

Since Purdue didn’t offer a course in Beer Appreciation, my knowledge of øl is a bit lacking, and I often find beer selection a little overwhelming.  Especially at places that give me over a hundred options.  (And especially since I’m a Libra.)  Last night was no exception, and after sending the waiter away once while I pored over the drinks menu.  I flipped to the less daunting page of draft beers (fat-øl in Norwegian, which always sounds funny to me).  I happened to make a comment about how odd it was that Budweiser was one of the few draft choices, and boy am I glad I did!

My beer-savvy friends explained to me that in Europe, Budweiser often refers to Budvar, a Czech beer brewed in the town formerly known as Budweiser.  The Budweiser.  Years ago, in an act of capitalist imperialism, the US Budweiser actually tried to buy out the Czech brewery in order to claim the trademark in Europe, but they failed.  The naming laws vary slightly, so in some European countries, the US Budweiser can’t use the name Budweiser and has to call itself Bud or Anheuser-Busch.  Similarly, the Czech beer is blocked from the name in the US, thanks to Budweiser’s long-standing trademark, but a few years ago Anheuser-Busch arranged for Budvar to be imported under the name Czechvar.

So all this time, I’d been mistakenly thinking that Lorry was wasting a tap on a non-descript American beer!  And thankfully my decision was made.  Of course I had to try the original Budweiser!

My opinion?  It definitely has a lot more flavor than the Budweiser I’m familiar with!  It’s good, and I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure it’s to my taste.  It has some of that “pine” taste that I’m not particularly fond of.  I’m sure someone with more beer knowledge can explain to me what that is.  But I certainly wouldn’t turn down another pint!

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 still get the idea of what the dish is supposed to be. Today required a bit more effort:

Today’s Soup: Steinsoppsuppe, translated “edible boletus soup.”

First of all, the fact that anything in the canteen needs to be explicitly described as edible is highly amusing!

Second, not being a biology major or Latin student, I was a little stumped on boletus.  Thanks to my rudimentary grocery-store-survival Norwegian skills, I recognized sopp as mushroom.  That knowledge, combined with my olfactory senses, led me to conclude that it was indeed some kind of mushroom soup.

In this case my Norwegian was actually better than my English, because I couldn’t make any sense of “edible boletus soup” (thus underscoring my original statement that Norwegians speak better English than I do).  Of course, no one else in the canteen had any idea what boletus meant either!

I was pretty sure this was a literal or dictionary translation of steinsopp gone horribly wrong.  And sure enough, according to Merriam-Webster:
boletus -  any of a genus (Boletus) of boletes (as a porcini) some of which are poisonous and others edible

There you go.  Edible boletus soup.  As opposed to poisonous boletus soup.

(I made life easy and just had the 2 asagane.)

I started laughing and nearly spit out a mouthful of soda!  Ironically, that was exactly against what the label instructed:  “Warning:  Drink Then Swallow.”

I have no idea how to explain this!  What does it even mean?  Why is it printed only in English on a Norwegian product label?  It seems to be a strictly Norwegian warning, since my Google search returned only a few results, all of which were in Norwegian, and none of which was particularly helpful.  Apparently a few Norwegians have noticed this particular warning as well, but they all just seem annoyed at the increasing number of common sense product warnings in general.

“Drink then Swallow?”  As opposed to what?!  Swallow first, then drink?  Drink then spit it out on the ground?

So far, the most popular theory is that one should not run around with a mouthful of Pepsi Max, since you might choke if you tripped.  First of all, who does that?  Second, if the warning is targeted at small children who might do that, what are the chances they read English?

Also, why is this warning not on any other soda bottle?  I’m honestly a little freaked out!  Maybe Pepsi Max has a higher acidity and is more likely to damage my teeth?  Who knows?!  I wish the stupid warning had a few more details, because honestly I’m now a bit wary about Pepsi Max and might just switch to Coke Zero or Coke Light.  Especially if I’m in the mood to run around with a mouthful of cola!

The World Accent Game
See how well you can identify speakers’ accents from all over the world.

I did surprisingly badly, though there were two that I was pleased with myself for getting right.  I was a bit ashamed that I failed to recognize a US accent, though.  I’ll post my results (with spoilers) for discussion in the comments, so don’t read them until you’ve played for yourself!

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 improve, paired with a group of jargon-laden managers, meant that you could have a field day with Buzzword Bingo.  It also meant that the trendy managerial catch-phrases became so unbelievably overused that they ceased making your teeth grind and instead made you struggle to suppress an inappropriate and involuntary chuckle whenever you heard them.

For example, the sentence, “Let’s discuss this after the meeting,” apparently went out of fashion.  With the project spread across three continents, a deluge of web meetings brought about repeated usage of the alternative, “Let’s take this offline.”  I imagine that this originally meant, “Hey, let’s stop wasting international long-distance charges, since we can discuss this locally after the meeting.”  However, it was used so often that a few people seemed to mis-translate it to “Let’s discuss this after the meeting,” and after a few months they were using it all the time, even for ordinary sit-around-a-table meetings!

The funniest of all, however, was “Air Quotes Girl.”  Somewhere she had picked up on foreign managers using fingered air quotes when they spoke.  However, as one of our project managers quickly realized, the local Chinese didn’t understand sarcasm.  At all.  He tried to explain it to them in a textbook kind of way, but you can imagine how well that worked.  You could see them trying to translate this kind of statement, and coming up with a general idea of what you meant, but stripped of all the humor and irony.

Now imagine someone who doesn’t understand sarcasm using air quotes.  We think she got the idea that air quotes indicated emphasis, because she would use them in the most unusual circumstances and air-quote the most unexpected words.  The créme de la créme was when she was talking to someone and said, “So you’re going to be on [air quote]vacation[/air quote] next week, right?”  He just stared at her confused, thinking “Am I fired, or something?!”

While the onset of the Beijing Olympics has induced a lot of nostalgia, the thing that actually prompted this particular recollection was a link to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.  Apparently a lot of people out there (and not just Chinese managers) just don’t “get” quote marks.  In some cases, the mistakes can really change the meaning and make it quite amusing!  For example:
 

Followup:  Apparently the iStockPhoto website has some confusion over quotation marks as well.  In trying to find an image for the original story, I searched for “air quotes” and receieved the following result:

Back in the Valley-Girl-stereotype days of the late 80s, I made a sincere effort to curb my Like-ing, but I quickly realized that this was more than just a ditzy vocalized pause.  To this day, I continue to overuse the word “like,” and I stand in its defense that it is not just an annoying habit of American English speakers.  I do not stand alone on my platform, as just last weekend, I rehashed this discussion with Shane, who Like-s with the same frequency and intent that I do.

Since this has come up more than once recently (BeijingBoyce has summarily banned me from attending the Beijing Olympics for this offense**), I thought it was an opportune time to explain to the rest of the world why otherwise-sensible, educated Americans continue to allow themselves to sound foolish by throwing a random “like” into every other sentence.

In the simplest of explanations, I think it stems from America’s litigious society.  The use (or at least my use and Shane’s use) of the word “like” implies a level of inaccuracy.  It’s especially useful during storytelling to allow a margin of error, and it simplifies quoting by signaling that you are paraphrasing.

The trite, mocking example of “And I was like…!  And she was like…!” is actually just depicting a paraphrased conversation.  For example, “When we finally found a table, the waiter was like, ‘You can’t sit there!’”  Perhaps the waiter actually said, “Excuse me, ma’am?  That table is reserved for VIP customers,” or “Sorry, that table’s closed!”  While the wording may not be exact, the idea is there.

Another example, “There must have been like 30 people wandering around, trying to find a place to sit.”  So maybe there weren’t 30.  Maybe there were 31 or 25, but there were roughly 30.

While I don’t personally subscribe to the exaggerate-to-improve-the-story school of thought, this is another case where ”like” comes in handy.  “After all of that, the prices were outrageous!  A steak cost like $50!”  The steak actually only cost $30.  Maybe $35 if you added béarnaise sauce.  But presumably $50 drives home the point better.  And if anyone ever calls you on it (or takes you to court in the US), you can point out that you said “like,” and therefore you didn’t actually lie to anyone!  Just consider it linguistic liability insurance.

* Though technically inaccurate, throughout this post I grudgingly use “America” and “American” to reference the United States of America, because “United States of America” and “person from the United States” are awkward and wordy.  But that’s a language discussion for another day.  [Edited 17Jul: Or not, since Shane apparently wanted to talk about it now!  (see comments)]

** No hard feelings!

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 like.  Jes, I’m forgetting how to spell.

Today I experienced the complete opposite.  I received an email from Microsoft that looked so much like a phishing attempt, I spent five minutes checking and rechecking the email address and links, looking for suspicious mistakes.  In the end, I clicked on one, fully expecting to be rerouted to a phishing site and was honestly suprised to end up at the actual Microsoft site.

This got me thinking.  If your audience is moderately tech-savvy, how better to encourage them to be careful than to send your actual message disguised as an attack?  Call it a Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing if you will.

Here is the entire email (in its original ghastly formatting) to demonstrate:

Big orange font?  Strange grammar (who really says “inactivate” an account instead of “deactivate” it)?  All this on top of of a mildly threatening request to log in and confirm all your personal data?  This has all the classic phishing signs.  So I checked the sending email address.  “msftconn@microsoft.com”  Well, that looks legit, but it’s easily faked.  How about those links?  Surely they’ll take me to something like “http://microsoftconnect.evilphishingsite.com” right?  No.  And a visit to Microsoft Connect actually shows that they want me to update my profile information!

At first I was bugged that Microsoft would send me this horribly formatted, poorly worded email and make me waste 10 minutes validating its authenticity.  And I’m sure this is actually the case, but what if they were trying out a new brilliant form of security?

Make the email look as suspicious as you possibly can (short of asking for bank information and mentioning an African inheritee in need of help), and people…  smart people…  are bound to check those links before clicking them blindly.

Yeah, this wouldn’t really work in mainstream cases, since there are plenty of naive people who actually do blindly click on links that say, “You must update uss yur bank info. or we will terminate your Reputable Bank account.  Click here to log in!“  But I must admit, their strange email did make me take a few extra measures (that I should really take all the time) to be sure it was legitimate!

On the other hand, no one has asked me yet, “How do you type using a Norwegian keyboard?” The answer is, “With a lot of patience and a lot of backspacing.” Since the Norwegian language has a few extra letters thrown in (ø,æ,å), the standard keyboard has been redesigned to accommodate them. These letters appear to the right of the L and P keys in place of some of the punctuation marks. The punctuation in turn has been scattered around the keyboard in various other places. Also, since there’s not enough room to fit them all, a second set of alternate marks appear on the number keys, so the 2 key also hosts the quotation mark as well as the @ symbol. The @ is accessed using a separate shift-style key, so typing email addresses becomes extremely annoying.

After only a day or two of trying to learn the new keyboard layout, I realized that even though my typing is far from perfect, I actually know roughly where most of the special characters are. I gave up trying to learn the Norwegian layout and set the keyboard settings back to a standard US layout. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about the actual characters printed on the keys, so for the past month it’s been like I’m back in typing class – not allowed to look at my hands. I’ve gotten over the worst of it, but I wonder if my typing has actual improved at all. Instead, I’ve started memorizing keyboard “translations!” For example, if I need to type a minus sign, I know to look down and find the plus key! Similarly, my parentheses are marked on 8 and 9, so I look down and use the key to the right of the one that’s marked.

For normal text, this isn’t really a problem. I use the alphabet and everyday punctuation enough that I never look at my keyboard to type commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, etc. Unfortunately, I have lost a little efficiency in coding. It’s not just that they’re less-used special characters, but I have short fingers, which means leaving “home row” to reach them comfortably. As soon as I’m out of position, I need to peek, and those are the keys that are ALL mixed up. So this has been a long exercise in learning to code with the right fingers.

For example…
for (int i=-10; i< =0; i++) { list[i]="foo"; }

My years of typing experience would lead me to type that on a Norwegian keyboard and get:
for )int i\019ø i;+0ø i??= P listpiå\ÆfooÆø

And if I have to cheat and look at all the keys, I’ll have:
for *int i)/10< i\)0#LT# i--( list i )@foo@<
That’s a pretty good reason to type without looking!

It makes me wonder how there can be so many great Scandinavian software developers (Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Jon Lech Johansen, etc). It also makes me wonder if programming languages would have come out differently if the first ones were developed on international keyboards. Consider the semi-colon, which is used to end every single statement in dozens of the most popular programming languages. It’s so convenient, right there on the home row; it’s just a pinky tap away! But on a Norwegian keyboard, it’s in the place of the < , not just off the home keys, but requiring a simultaneous shift with every use! Perhaps if it was as much work to reach on other keyboards, we would be ending statements with something else.

But even more difficult to master than C++ and C# on a Norwegian keyboard is HTML. It's kind of convenient to have the angle brackets <> on their own key, but I just can’t get used to the forward slash, which is hiding up on Shift+7. I could probably get used to it if I tried long enough, but I know the “normal” locations well enough not to bother.

Here is a comparison of a line of HTML:
< a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://blog.megdesk.com?p=103" mce_href="http://blog.megdesk.com?p=103" target="_blank">HTML link< /a>

Typing that on a Norwegian keyboard:
;a style\Ætext+decorationØnoneÆ href+ÆhttpØ–blog.megdesk.com_p\103Æ target+Æ?blankÆ:HTML link;-a:

I can survive with a Norwegian layout, and it’s been an interesting experience, but I think I’m going to bring in a US keyboard soon.